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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 



THE 



CHRISTIAN RELIGION 



GEORGE PARK FISHER, D.D.,LL.D. 

PROFESSOR 
OF BCCLESIASTICAIi HISTORY IN YAI.E COLLEGE 



J'JN 17 1886/ 

NEW YOKE 
THE CHAUTAUQUA PEESS 

C. li. S. C. DEPARTMENT 

805 Broadway 
1886 



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,al 



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COPYRIGHT BY 
CHARLES SCRIBNER's SONS 

1882, 1886 



GRANT & FAIRE3 
PHILADELPHIA 



*** The required books of the C. L. S. C. are recommended by 
a council of six. It must, however, be understood that recommendation 
does not involve an approval by the Council, or by cmy member of it, 
of every principle or doctrine contained in the book recommended. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 



I SHALL not enter the lists as a combatant against 
any of the recent assailants of the Christian Reli- 
gion. Eeligious controversy is some- Religious 
times necessary : it is often useful ; but versy. 
it is always exposed to disadvantages. It is very 
apt to draw about it a multitude of readers whose 
interest in it is akin to that which animates the 
spectators of a cock-fight. It easily degenerates 
into a game of fence, where the vivacity and 
expertness of the competitors in the duel are of 
more consequence than the justice of the cause. 
Christianity is a large matter ; the Bible is a large 
book, or rather collection of books forming a con- 
nected whole. It is easy for an ingenious mind to 
bring forward objections, suggest difficulties of 
greater or less weight, and propound mistaken or 



4 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

half-mistaken assertions. Of all warfare, guerilla- 
fighting is the least satisfactory. It is proverbial 
that a question respecting any system, however 
well founded, may be asked in one line, which 
it may require pages to answer. To reply to 
a medley of such objections one by one is like 
the business of picking up pins ; and, even when 
the work is really done, the impression left is 
that made by an apology, according to the fine 
old maxim, ''Qui ^excuse s^accusej'^ Most of 
the popular objections are not in the least novel. 
A critical attack, peculiar in its character, has 
been made on Christianity in recent times in 
Germany by Strauss and Baur. It has been re- 
oid newed in France in a modified form by 

objections 

renewed. Ecuau. Materialism, either in a bald 
shape or in its agnostic dress, has made itself a prom- 
inent antagonist. But assailants of Christianity in 
American journals frequently take up last-century 
weapons which have been cast aside by adversaries 
of the gospel who are abreast of the times. To 

^ He who excuses liiinself accuses kimself. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 

confute attacks of this sort, such as were common 
in the old deistical controversy, would be to beat 
straw already well thrashed. In truth, it is re- 
markable how many of these objections were made 
by Celsus as early as the close of the second cen- 
tury, — for example, the objection from alleged dis- 
crepancies in the Gospels, — and were successfully 
disposed of by Origen, the great Christian scholar 
of that day. 

I prefer a more positive method of handling the 
subject. As there is a variety of topics to be 
touched upon, it will be convenient to separate 
them by numerical designations. 

1. Christianity is not a new thing. It is not 
contending for a foothold on the earth. Its roots are 
deep in the soil. It is a g-reat, lonp;-es- 

^ & ^ fe Power and 

tablished, wide-spread, and still advanc- S ^chris-^ 
ing religion. It is the faith of the ^^^^* 
enlightened nations, incorporated in them at the 
beginning of their existence, helping to create them, 
presiding over their growth. It has moulded to a 
great extent their political and social institutions, 
their sentiments and usages, and leavened their 



6 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

literature and laws. It has entered into their very- 
blood and marrow. To dislodge Christianity as 
a supernatural religion, were it possible, from the 
convictions and life of the European nations and 
their offshoots, would be a revolution the magni- 
tude and terrible effect of which, as I believe, it is 
impossible to conceive. The old Grseco-Eoman 
religion fell, but it fell by the expulsive power of 
a new and better faith. Had it been swept away 
by mere unbelief, with nothing but atheism, or the 
indistinct and fluctuating creed of natural religion, 
to stand in the room of it, who can doubt that there 
would have been a ruin without a recovery ? But 
the principal thing which I wish to say under this 
head is, that the burden of disproving Christianity 
and demonstrating that it rests on a false founda- 
tion properly falls on the assailing party; and, 
further, to intimate that the task is not a light one. 
2. It should be understood, at the outset, that 
no one claims that the system of Christianity is 
Mysteries free from difficulties, which may, here 

in Chris- ^ n t • i 

tianity. and there, be of a perplexmg character. 

This is no more than is admitted by everybody, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 7 

except narrow partisans, in the case of every 
science. The same thing is true, I believe, of the 
law of gravitation. There are mysteries which 
are not cleared up, which revelation does not pre- 
tend to clear up, — some, it is likely, which the 
human intelligence, at its present grade of develop- 
ment, is incapable of exploring. We are not yet 
arrived at the summit where we can overlook the 
universe. Christianity is a practical system : its 
founder likened himself to a physician. We are 
justified in taking food, and in taking medicine 
when we are sick, and this not merely on grounds 
of experience. We can see to some extent the 
rationale of the operation of food and medicine, 
even without an exhaustive knowledge of chemis- 
try and physiology, and the hidden process of life 
and growth. An apostle only claimed for himself 
and others to " know in part,^^ to have a fragmen- 
tary and obscure knowledge — but still a real 
knowledge — of things invisible. The question 
respecting any creed proposed for belief, whether 
in religion or philosophy or science, is whether the 
reasons for it are stronger than the reasons against 



8 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

it^ and whether they are enough stronger to justify 
credence. Christianity asks no more for itself 
than is conceded in regard to every other system 
and theory, and in regard generally to events which 
do not fall under the immediate notice of the 
senses ; though even here time and space, sense- 
perception, and the reality of an external world 
are not free from the most perplexing difficulties. 

3. Another thing which may as well be said 
here is, that Christians are not all agreed in their 
Differences opiuious, that it is Unreasonable to 

among 

Christians. expcct them to coucur on all points, 
and that it is unfair to identify the special ideas of 
a class with the essentials of Christian belief. 
What master in philosophy was ever interpreted 
just alike by all of his adherents? The disciples 
of Plato have differed as to his meaning on par- 
ticular points. One of them has maintained one 
thing, and another the opposite. Some have 
denied certain Dialogues to be his, which others 
with equal confidence have declared to be genuine. 
Yet there is an essential Platonism in which, as a 
body, Platonic disciples are agreed. Where is 



THE CHRISTIAN BELIGIOK 9 

there a political party which has existed for a score 
of years, the members of which are perfectly at 
one in their creed ? How commonly do they dis- 
agree as to the meaning of their " platform/^ and 
this when there is no designed ambiguity in it ! 
It would be too much to expect that on a subject 
like Christianity, covering, as it does, so broad a 
field, and as to the precise character of the Bible 
as a whole, and of its component parts, there 
should be an absolute accord among all who call 
themselves, and deserve to be called. Christians. 
To take a single example : there are some who hold 
that every thing that is said in the Scriptures which 
bears on natural and physical science is correct, 
and of divine authority. There are others who 
hold that the biblical writers, whatever they knew 
of the physical world, accommodated their lan- 
guage to the science of their time. Others, again, 
hold that in the Bible are positive errors in science, 
which, however, are affirmed, not to militate against 
its authority as a teacher of moral and religious 
truth. These last are not to be denied the name 
of Christians : the fundamental principles of super- 



10 THE CHRISTIAN BELIGIOK 

natural Christianity they may cherish with all their 
hearts. It is a blunder of ignorance, or a trick of 
controversy, to refuse to discriminate between what 
is essential to a system and the diverse opinions, on 
points not essential, which spring up among its 
adherents. The line of demarcation it may not be 
so easy to draw. There may be a difference as to 
where exactly it should run ; but the existence of 
such a line none but a sophistical reasoner will 
ignore. 

4. Before proceeding farther, it is well to advert 
to an idea which I had formerly supposed was 
^ ,. . nearly extinct in the world, — the idea, 

Is religion "^ ' ' 

baneful? namely, that religion, and the Christian 
religion in particular, is a bane. The Epicureans 
thought it an advantage to have deities which stood 
aloof from all concern for men or connection with 
human affairs. Lucretius wrote a poem to set forth 
the atomic theory of the universe, and thus to 
deliver men^s minds from the terrors of superstition 
and all the gloom and torture of soul of which 
religion was the occasion. It cannot be denied that 
religion has been the occasion of incalculable suffer- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 11 

ing. Think of the uncounted victims of religious 
intolerance ! Think of the animosity and blood- 
shed caused by religious wars ! What an amount 
of misery arose out of the European wars of the 
seventeenth century^ which had their origin largely 
in religious dissension ! It seems a quick way to 
abolish these manifold calamities to abolish religion 
itself. Does it need to be said that there is another 
side to the picture ? Apart from the fallacy of 
charging on a feeling or principle the consequences 
of its abuse or perversion, one should look at the 
comfort, wholesome restraint, uplifting hope, and 
all the other purifying, elevating, beneficial influ- 
ences, incalculable in their extent, which have gone 
forth to the individual, to the household, to the 
state, and to mankind at large, from religion in its 
purer forms. Moreover, one should look at the 
state of things which would ensue if religion, and 
the Christian religion, were swept away, and men 
were left to be born, and toil and live and die, 
"having no hope, and without God in the world.^^ 
This way of arguing against religion as banefa] 
really contains an argument /or religion. The evil 



12 THE CHRISTIAN BELIGIOK 

that has sprung from fanaticism and other abuses 
of the religious sentiment shows how deeply planted 
religion is in the constitution of human nature, how 
powerful and ineradicable a feeling it is. In no 
other way can we account for its tremendous influ- 
ence, when unenlightened or morbid, for evil. 
Why not go for getting rid of the nervous system 
on account of sciatica and neuralgia ? Apply the 
same sort of reasoning which is used against religion 
to the passion of love as between the sexes. Who 
can measure the agony of which it has been the 
occasion, — ^the corroding jealousies, the frantic rage, 
abiding rancor, adulteries, self-murder, sanguinary 
wars, from the siege of Troy for the capture of 
Helen to the connection of IMark Antony and 
Cleopatra, and from the epoch of the Egyptian 
sorceress down to our day ? Remembering Pa^scaFs 
remark, that, if Cleopatra^s nose had been longer 
or shorter, the course of history would have been 
changed, I am tempted to turn aside, and show 
what unutterable woe would have been spared to 
mankind if ^^the fatal gift'^ of beauty had not been 
given to woman or to man. But, not to leave our 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 13 

illustration, if love had been absent, and the sensi- 
bilities and propensities involved in it, none can 
doul^t that frightful sorrows would have been 
avoided. But then, among other things, we should 
have missed the family ! To argue that religion is 
a curse is like contending that domestic life and 
human government are a curse. If the family had 
not existed, or were to be abolished, an unmeasured 
amount of petty tyranny, grinding toil, anguish at 
bereavement, would not have been, and would be 
no more. Then, as to human government, what is 
it but a long record of oppression? The cruel 
deeds of tyrants, — of the Pharaohs, the Neros, the 
Napoleons, the ravaging wars which rulers have 
instigated, the dynastic struggles, — were they all 
written down, the world would not contain the 
books. Yet, is human government a bane ? 

What is there bad in religion ? Religion is love 
to God and men ! What more is required by 
religion but ^4o do justly, and to love Nothing 

.1-1 harmful in 

mercy, and to walk numbly with thy Religion. 
God " ? (Micah vi. 8.) This is religion even accord- 
ing to an Old-Testament definition. Is this harm- 



14 THE CHRISTIAN EELIGIOK 

ful to the individual who practises it ? Is it hurtful 
to a neighborhood or to a civil community? 
Would it be bad for farmers, merchants, artisans, 
for young people or old people, or any other class ? 
Are penitence for evil-doing, trust in a heavenly 
Father who is more willing to bless than is an 
earthly parent, the conforming of one's life to the 
purest Example, in which righteousness and love 
are perfect and perfectly blended, mischievous ? Is 
it mischievous to resist temptation, and to pray to 
God for help in the conflict, and for aid in be- 
coming unselfish ? Yet these are essential ingredi- 
ents in practical Christianity, and Christianity has 
nothing in it incompatible with them ; but every 
thing else in Christianity is auxiliary to them. 

I must confess myself amazed that any rational 

person can read history with the least attention, 

and fail to see the beneficent influence 

Benefits of 

Christianity ^£ ^^^ Christian religion. To vindicate 
Christianity in this particular appears very like 
pronouncing a eulogy upon the sun in answer to 
the assertion that there was light — ^^ cosmic light'' 
— in the world before the sun first rose in the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGIOK 15 

heavens, and in order to rebut the complaint that 
the sun has been sometimes clouded, and gives us, 
not unfrequently, dull and murky days. What 
was the world into which Christianity state of the 

, 111 Ancient 

entered ? Tribes and nations had been Worid. 
distinct, each of them shut up in its own boundar- 
ies, and going forth only to make war on its neigh- 
bors. Then all were subdued, and reduced under 
the hard domination of one city. Liberty — such 
as had existed in Greek towns where there was a 
little fraction of freemen to a multitude of slaves, 
and in Rome within the oligarchy which ruled it — 
had disappeared. As concerns morality, Roman 
slavery, the slavery of whites, — of artists, teachers, 
and authors, as well as of peasants, — which was 
bad enough under the Republic, grew worse after 
its fall ; gladiatorial combats, where all classes of 
people applauded the butchery of men by thousands 
in the arena ; infanticide, countenanced by philoso- 
phers and statesmen ; the foulest sorts of pollution, 
to which modern society is a stranger, — these are 
some of the features of social life at that epoch. 
The picture of ancient morals and manners has 



16 THE CHRISTIAN BELIGION. 

been sometimes drawn in colors too black, and 
without due discrimination; but when faithfully 
drawn it justifies the condemnation which the 
Apostle Paul pours upon it in the introduction of 
his Letter to the Roman Church.^ There were 
noble men in antiquity, and there were virtuous 
women. But when one hears laudations of ancient 
morals, as if there was a state of things to be com- 
pared for a moment with the pure atmosphere of 
Christian society, one can hardly avoid reminding 
the authors of such false and ignorant comparisons 
that the noblest man of all the ancients went with 
his disciples to visit a prostitute, not to advise her 
^^ to sin no more,'^ but to talk on the question how 
to ply her occupation with most profit.^ Consider- 
ing what Greek life was, Socrates deserves no severe 
reproach. But this verdict in his favor condemns 
the society where even the best of its members 
knew no better. 

Neither Socrates nor Plato rose above the Greek 

^ I have endeavored to describe the morals of heathen so^ 
ciety in "The Beginnings of Christianity/' ch. vi. 
^ Xenophon: "Memorabilia," II., xi. 



THE CHRISTIAN EELIGIOK 17 

prejudice against "the barbarian/^ There came, 
indeed, at length, a dawning sense of a humanity 
not limited by barriers of nation and Lack of 

humane 

race. Yet utterances of this nature Feeling. 
are heard chiefly from the Stoic sect, — a sect which 
purchased tranquillity at the cost of sympathy, 
and, by smothering emotion, indulged in compas- 
sion only in contradiction to its own fundamental 
tenets, and preached fatalism and the drifting of all 
things to destruction as the best gospel it could 
discover. If Terence wrote a line in praise of 
humane feeling, Plautus declared that " man is a 
wolf to the stranger,^^ — " Homo homini ignoto lupus 
esV^ The only Roman writer who expresses a 
disapproval of gladiatorial fights is Seneca, and he 
only in his old age, after he had implied in earlier 
writings a contrary view. Even the younger 
Pliny applauds the provisions made by a private 
person, as well as by Trajan, for these bloody 
amusements.^ 

^ See Friedlander's comments on Cicero's view, etc., in the 
" Sittengesch. Eoms," I., 242, 243; and Goll, "Hellas u. 
Rom," 158, 159. 



18 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 

Charity, compassionate love, says Boeckh, one 
of the profoundest classical scholars of the present 
Restric- age, was no virtue of the ancient world. 

tions of ^ , 

charity Kindly sayings can be met with, as 

blossoms are found on the high Alps in the midst 
of the snow. There are instances of philanthropy 
in something approaching to a systematic form. 
But it takes more than one swallow to make a 
spring. The few examples of benevolence on a 
broad scale, which are often referred to, are gener- 
ally more apparent than real. The provision for 
poor children and for orphans, begun by Nerva 
and carried out by Trajan, w^as for the increase of 
the free population, just as Augustus had offered a 
bounty on marriage. The number of boys sup- 
ported was ten times that of girls, which indicates 
that female children were in large numbers aban- 
doned, either to perish or to be saved from death 
for a worse lot. Children deserted by their parents 
Avere reared by a special class of slave-dealers, 
in order to sell them as slaves.^ Measures which 

^ See Merivale : "History of the Komans,'' vii., 208, 209. 



THE CHRISTIAN EELIGION. 19 

were founded on policy — as much so as the feeding 
of the idle populace of Rome out of the public 
granary — are not to be construed into evidences of 
benevolence. The motive of the benefaction of 
Trajan is shown in the fact that it made no provi- 
sion for children thus abandoned to perish. The 
same ^' mild ^^ Trajan, — and he was mild in com- 
parison with many of the emperors, — after his 
victories on the Danube, put ten thousand men 
into the arena, who continued for four months to 
soak the sand with their blood.^ The truth is, 
that among the Jews alone the spirit of fraternity 
and charity prevailed. The Jew alone left in his 
field the sheaf of grain for the gleaner, and in the 
vineyard the bunch of grapes for the needy. Aris- 
totle and Plato were the philosophers of widest 
repute. Aristotle defends slavery on the ground 
that the slave is an animated tool. Plato discoun- 
tenances an interest in the poor when they are sick. 
The laboring man who cannot recover, the physi- 
cian is to abandon, or to experiment on. In all 

iDio,LXVIII., 15. 



20 THE CHRISTIAN EELIGION. 

antiquity the individual was merged in the state. 
When the states of antiquity fell the Stoic dreamed 
of a cosmopolitan state ; but it remained a dream. 
Christianity came into the world with a new 
commandment, to ^' love one another.^^ It brought 
Benefi- in the principle of the brotherhood of 

cence of i i . 

Christians. man. it broke down the barriers of 
country and clan. It gathered the Greek and bar- 
barian, the rich and the poor/ the freeman and the 
slave, about the Lord's table, where all differences 
were merged in a fraternal unity. The Christian 
churches were eleemosynary societies. They dis- 
pensed alms with an open hand to their own poor, 
and to the needy about them. There had been 
sodalities for mutual benefit, — mutual insurance 
clubs; but such beneficence and self-sacrifice as 
Christians showed were something altogether new 
in the world. The indigent, the oppressed, the 
desponding invalid, the toiling slave, took heart 
and hope. There was sympathy for them here on 
earth, and a bright hope beyond death. 

Christianity survived persecution. It was 
stronger than Rome, stronger than pagan fan- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 21 

aticism. It displaced the old religion. Amidst 
the decay of all to which the hearts of men had 
clung, Christianity remained the sole . 

stay and hope of a falling world. The J3%i? 
Church turned to the Germanic nations, 
carried to them the gospel, reduced their languages 
to writing, gave them the Bible and a literature, 
civilized them, conveyed to them such learning and 
such of the arts of life as had outlived the tides of 
barbarian invasion. The oldest writings in the 
Teutonic tongues are the fragments of the Gothic 
translation of the Bible by Ulfilas. As he gave 
letters to the Goths, another missionary, Cyril, did 
the same service for the Slavonic peoples. Anglo- 
Saxon literature, with English civilization, grew 
up among our fierce barbarian ancestors through 
their conversion by Augustine, and the connection 
into which they were brought with the converted 
nations of the Continent. It is very doubtful 
w^hether the individuals of our Teutonic race who 
attack the Christian religion would know their 
letters, or would be possessed of any vehicle for 
expressing their ideas except in an oral form, had 



22 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

it not been for the heroic missionaries of that reli- 
gion which is thought to be so deleterious in its 
influence. In Christian monasteries the remains 
of ancient literature were preserved. By Christian 
monks barbarians were taught agriculture and what- 
ever knowledge was left from the general wreck. 
From schools founded by British missionaries^ and 
by Charlemagne (who was taught his letters by an 
English clergyman), the universities of Europe 
afterward arose. In the partial corruption of the 
Church, the Scriptures had still been preserved ; 
the truth of the gospel had not been quenched. 
When the Bible was opened, out of the bosom of 
the Church came a great reformation. Religion in 
its purified form manifested its immortal power in 
the individual and for the renovation of society. 
From the awakening of the souls of men to a 
truer sense of their relations to God and to Christ, 
resulted in modern times the demand for political 
liberty and for institutions more conformed to 
justice. The struggle for English freedom ensued, 
and the events which paved the way for the 
American Republic. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGIOK 23 

I have not space to pursue this topic. The 
eccentric thesis that religion — that the Christian 
relio-ion as it is set forth in the New 

^ The ef- 

Testament — is a curse may be tested in the^oipei 
a practical way. Let any one imagine 
the best and most faithful Christian^ measured by 
the New-Testament standard, whom he knows, to 
be deprived of his religion altogether, or even of 
such elements in it as are the exclusive result of 
the gospel, and then let him ask himself if his 
manhood would be improved by the change, and 
if his influence in the aggregate would be for the 
better. Then let the same person imagine the 
entire community to be stri2)ped of the churches, 
hospitals, schools, the customs of private prayer 
and household religious teaching, — stripped, in a 
word, of all the beliefs, habits, feelings, institu- 
tions, laws, so far as their origin is due to the 
gospel of Christ as taught in the New Testament, 
and then let him inquire of himself whether the 
change would be salutary, or whether, in case the 
gospel had not borne these fruits, anything else 
equally desirable would have grown up in the 



24 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

room of them. Let him make up the account, 
putting in the cohimn opposite to the benefits of 
Christianity whatever of evil he thinks has come 
from it, or would have been prevented without it. 
Let him make the calculation for himself, and 
render an honest verdict. 

5. What is Christianity ? It is composed of facts 
and doctrines, two elements which I shall severally 
What is the cousider hereafter. Christians believe in 

Christian 

Faith? the supernatural mission of Jesus, in his 

divine sonship, in the authority of his teaching and 
of the teaching of his apostles, in his spotless excel- 
lence, in his miracles, in his death and resurrection. 
They believe that God has established a kingdom 
in the world, a spiritual kingdom, the beginnings 
of which were laid in the remote past ; that it began 
in the separation of one man, Abraham, from the 
surrounding idolatry, and in the segregation from 
idolatrous peoples of the nation which sprang from 
him ; that this kingdom, founded and sustained by 
a supernatural Providence, was carried from stage 
to stage until its consummation, or its attaining to 
a ripe and universal form, through Jesus Christ ; 



THE CHRISTIAN EELIGIOK 25 

that within this kingdom true religion was planted 
and nourished until it arrived at perfection in the 
final or Christian stage of revelation, when it only 
remained to diffuse it over the earth ; that to this 
outcome the whole system, even in its rudimental 
shape, looked and tended; and that Christianity 
was the object of prediction, sometimes dim, some- 
times more clear ; that the manifestation of God 
was primarily in act and deed, or in a succession 
of historical events in which the divine agency was 
evidently concerned, and which served, therefore, to 
reveal God and to bring men into communion with 
him ; that for the understanding of the significance 
of these transactions the minds of prophets and 
apostles were supernaturally enlightened, whereby 
they were qualified to be the expositors of the out- 
w ard revelation and to enforce its lessons. 

A distinction must be made between revelation 
and inspiration, and between Christianity and the 
Bible. He is the recipient of a revela- Keveiation 

. . , . , . and Inspira- 

tion to whom insight into truth is super- t^oii- 

naturally communicated. The same man may, or 

may not, be inspired to set forth the contents of that 



26 THE CHRISTIAN BELIGIOK 

revelation either orally or in a writing. But 
Christianity existed and was complete^ and it was 
preached, before a syllable of the New Testament 
was written. Christians hold to the obvious his- 
torical fact that the old dispensation stands in an 
organic relation to the new. Christianity sprang 
up among the Jews. If science is from the Greeks, 
and law is from the Romans, " salvation is of the 
Jews.^^ Religion was the one absorbing idea and 
interest of that people as it never has been of any 
other. The Son of man is the Son of David. But 
a great part of the Bible is made up of narratives. 
How far were the writers aided from above in the 
composition of them, and how far did they depend 
on observations and inquiries like those through 
which writers of secular history, into which the 
miraculous element does not enter, gain their in- 
formation ? No one holds that history was to any 
considerable extent dictated to them. Some Chris- 
tians hold that inspiration guided their minds in 
the selection and omission of matter. Some hold 
that inspiration protected them from all sorts of 
error, even such imperfections as the most accurate 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 27 

and faithful narrators are liable to fall into. Others 
dissent from this last view. But Christians gener- 
ally consider these historical books of the Old and 
New Testaments, and all the other books of the 
Bible, to be differentiated from all other literature, 
as being pervaded by another spirit, which is due 
to the fact that they are produced on the plane of 
revelation, and stand in a peculiar relation to the 
supernatural events Avhich form its groundwork. 
The books of the Bible are the documents of the 
Christian religion, from which its facts and doc- 
trines, and the circumstances of its origin and 
growth, can be correctly ascertained. Deviations 
from traditional theories of inspiration may be 
erroneous, or they may be well founded ; but no 
man who accepts the essential truths of Christianity 
is to be denied the title of Christian on the ground 
of peculiarities of opinion on this subject. 

6. The foregoing remarks naturally bring us to 
the important fact of the gradualness of divine reve- 
lation. Like the subsequent spread of Gradual- 
ness of 
the gospel, it was ^^ first the blade, then Revelation. 

the ear, then the full corn in the ear.'^ This in- 



28 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 

choate, preparatory, and, in this sense, imperfect 
character is ascribed to the Old-Testament system, 
both in the Old Testament itself and in the New. 
The whole form of the kingdom of God in the earlier 
dispensation was provisional ; the disclosure of God 
was partial and increasing ; laws fell short of the 
absolute standard of moral duty ; rites were adapted 
to religious feelings and to perceptions not yet 
mature ; the type of character corresponded to the 
inadequate conceptions of God ; the ethical and 
emotional expressions answered to the several stages 
of revelation to which they pertained. All this 
ought to be as familiar to readers of the Bible as 
the alphabet. Unhappily, it has been often over- 
looked by Christians, and persistently ignored by 
the adversaries of Christianity. 

Christ contrasted his precepts with the injunctions 
given to them of old time. He taught that sin. 
The Gospel and uot siuucrs, was to be the object of 

and the Mo- rr^i i t • r» i i 

saic Law. abhorrcncc. The boundaries oi love and 
good-will were to be co-extensive with the race of 
mankind. Men were to pray for their enemies. 
Referring to an important precept in the Mosaic 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 29 

legislation^ that relating to divorce, he said that it 
was given on account of '' the hardness ^^ of men^s 
hearts ; that is, their rude, uncivilized condition, and 
their moral obtuseness (Matt. xix. 8). The Mosaic 
law required a man who wished to be rid of his 
wife, to give her a written testimony which should 
protect her — when all women separate from a 
family were castaways — and enabled her to contract 
marriage with another man. This was a limit to 
the husband's arbitrary prerogative, a restraint put 
upon him, and so far an approach to the full recog- 
nition of her marital rights, and of the sacred char- 
acter of the marriage-tie. It was a step in the right 
direction, and as long a step, considering the state 
of society then existing, as could be taken. To 
attempt more would have been to rush into doc- 
trinaire legislation of the most impracticable char- 
acter. To complain of this old divorce law, one 
of the various enactments by which the Hebrew 
wife and the Hebrew family finally attained to a 
position which they held in no heathen nation, and 
by which safeguards were set around the purity of 
the household, — to complain of this law is as illogi- 



30 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

cal as it is for advocates of temperance to pronounce 
every license law immoral^ when, if the law were 
called restrictive (as it might be), the whole force 
of their objection would vanish. It is not less 
unreasonable than it would be to complain of the 
civil law at present, because, while it prohibits and 
punishes certain forms of slander, it publishes no 
statute for the detection and punishment of gossip 
and petty defamation ; as if the forbidding of one 
offence involved an approval of the other. 

Now, an application of the fact of the gradual- 

ness and partialness of revelation will remove most, 

, ^ if not all, of the moral difficulties which 

Removal of ^ 

difficulties. ^^g ^^jg^^ ^j^j^ regard to the Old Testa- 
ment. Whoever discerns distinctly this fact — 
which is a perfectly manifest fact — will have gained 
a point of view where the major part of these diffi- 
culties disappear of themselves. Without this his- 
torical sense, without a sympathetic appreciation 
of the condition of mankind in the far-distant ages 
when the movement of revelation began, the old 
dispensation and the Old Testament can never be 
understood. Those who have no dislike for the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 31 

New Testament, but have only hard words for the 
Old^ who can honor the heavenly Father of whom 
Christ speaks, but find the Jehovah of the law and 
the prophets repulsive, may be compared to one 
who relishes a ripe and juicy peach, but has no 
patience with the rough and bitter peach-stone from 
which the tree sprang. 

The benign tendencies and effect of the institu- 
tions and laws of the Old Testament, when com- 
pared with the legislation of all other Laws of 

the Old 

ancient nations, have been often demon- Testament. 
strated. One of the most lucid discussions of the 
subject, in a brief compass, is that of Professor 
Goldwin Smith, in his tract entitled " Does the 
Bible sanction American Slavery ?^^ He justly 
characterizes the Old-Testament legislation as " a 
code of laws, the beneficence of which is equally 
unapproached by any code, and least of all by any 
Oriental code, not produced under the influence of 
Christianity/^ The purpose was not to transform 
society by a miracle. That is not the method of 
God. The Jewish code brought in no barbarous 
institution or custom. Its aim and result are to 



32 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

reform, mitigate, and finally abolish evil usages 
already existing. Take the laws respecting the 
avenger of blood. This wild kind of justice is 
well-nigh universal among primitive tribes. The 
Old Testament did not attempt to abolish it at a 
stroke, but laid upon it useful restrictions. The 
avenger could punish no sort of homicide but 
wilful murder ; the innocent slayer was furnished 
with a safe retreat ; no money was to be taken in 
satisfaction for blood ; hereditary feuds were for- 
bidden ; judges were provided in all the tribes to 
arbitrate between the slayer and avenger.^ Thus a 
reign of law was introduced which in time must 
supplant, and actually did supplant, private venge- 
ance. Take the laws relative to the right of 
asylum, another ancient institution existing among 
the Greeks and Romans, and prominent in the 
middle ages among the semi-civilized European 
nations. In old times it w^as a beneficent check 
upon lawless violence. It furnished safe retreats 
for the unprotected ; but gross abuses always arose 

^ Num. xxxvi. ; Deut. xxi. 16. 



THE CHRISTIAN EELIGIOK 33 

in connection with it. Superstitions about sacred 
plades and the immunity of criminals were con- 
nected with it. The Mosaic law recognized the 
custom. It established six cities of refuge. But 
these were not for the wilful murderer. He was 
to be dragged from the altar.^ The cities were not 
to be holy places. They were for the shelter of 
the sojourner as well as of the Jew. The fugitive 
was not compelled to stay in them forever : he 
might leave the asylum with impunity on the death 
of the high priest.^ Look at the laws rcvspecting 
paternal authority. In patriarchal society the rule 
of the father was supreme and absolute. It con- 
tinued to be an unqualified despotism among the 
Romans. A. Eoman father had the legal right to 
take the lives of his wife and children. As late as 
the time of Seneca, Erixon, a Roman knight, put 
his son to death. Under the Mosaic law a mother 
must concur with the father in an accusation against 
a rebellious son. There must be a charge before 
" the elders/^ — a solemn public proceeding.^ Poly- 

i Exod. xxi. 14. 2 :^s'uin. xxxv. 26-28. ^ Deut. xxi. 18-22. 



34 THE CHRISTIAN RELIOIOK 

gamy prevailed in primitive times. A woman 
disconnected from a family was the most forlorn 
of beings. She was a miserable outcast. The 
Mosaic law did not abolish polygamy, but it alle- 
viated its evils. If one wife was hated and an- 
other favored, still the first-born child, if it was 
" hers that was hated/' should inherit a double 
portion.^ It may be here remarked that woman 
among the Hebrews was never degraded as in 
most Oriental countries. In the decalogue, adul- 
tery and the coveting of a neighbor's wife or 
maid-servant were prohibited. Crimes against the 
purity of matron or maid were rigorously pun- 
ished. Among the leaders celebrated in Hebrew 
story were such as Miriam and Deborah. Millen- 
niums before the discussions of our day upon the 
emancipation of women Deborah was a judge in 
Israel. The description of a virtuous housewife 
in the Proverbs ^ — the woman "in whom the heart 
of her husband doth safely trust '^ — exhibits the 
Hebrew ideal of the wife and mother. Inhuman 

» Deut. xxi. 15-17. » Prov. xxxi. 10-31. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 35 

as the rules of war were among the ancient Hebrews, 
the Mosaic legislation on this subject was for that 
day humane. The opportunity was to be given 
to a besieged city to surrender and to become 
tributary. The inhabitants had the option of 
saving their lives.^ The Hebrews were forbidden 
to do as the Greeks did, — cut down the fruit-trees 
in a district which they invaded. If an attractive 
female was captured, she might be taken to wdfe, 
and then must be treated as a wife ; but it was 
forbidden '' to sell her at all for money.^^ ^ Who- 
ever has read Homer, or studied the Assyrian and 
Babylonian mommaents, or even read the history 
of the Thirty Years' War, may be safely trusted 
to pronounce a judgment on the spirit and tendency 
of this legislation. The Jews were forced to fight 
in self-defence, surrounded as they were by power- 
ful and aggressive nations. But they did not 
become a warlike people. War was never the 
great occupation ; military distinction never counted 
for so much as was the case in other nations ; and 

^ Deut. XX. 10 ; Deut. xx. 19, 20. ^ D^^t ^xi. 10. 



36 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 

there were checks upon enforced military service, 
as remarkable as they were beneficent. 

Professor Gold win Smith has just observations 
respectijig monarchy among the Hebrews. Their 
Monarchy Icadcrs rccoguized the advantages of a 

among the 

Hebrews. free Commonwealth^ and felt it to be 
more consonant with their idea and function as a 
people. But when the people — being what they 
were — ^preferred monarchy, monarchy was allowed. 
But the Hebrew kings were not Oriental despots. 
They reigned by consent of the people. There 
were laws which set a limit to their prerogatives. 
There were fearless prophets to rebuke and de- 
nounce the proudest of them. The right of 
revolution was maintained. No such man as 
Nebuchadnezzar would have been endured by the 
Hebrew people. 

Respecting Hebrew worship, Professor Gold win 
Smith remarks,- 

" All the nations worshipped God by sacrifice and through 
Hebrew outward forms till the mind of man had been 

Worship. raised high enough to worship in spirit and in 

truth. The Hebrew law-giver did not originate sacrificial 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 37 

rites, but he elevated and purified them, and guarded them 
against the most horrible aberrations as to the nature of God, 
and the mode of winning his favor and averting his wrath, 
as all who know the history of heathen sacrifices, Eastern or 
Western, must perceive. The scapegoat has been and is a 
subject of much mockery to philosophers. Moses did not 
introduce that symbolic way of relieving the souls of a 
people from the burden of sin, and assuring them of the 
mercy of God ; but he took care that the scapegoat should 
be a goat^ and not, as at polished Athens and civilized Kome, 



The Levites were not a sacerdotal caste. They 
were set apart for service in the ritual by the laying- 
on of the hands of '' the children of Israel/^ who 
were gathered in an assembly for the purpose. 
The right to teach was not confined to the priestly 
class. The prophet held a more exalted station 
than the priest; and one might be called, like 
Amos, to the prophetic office, whose occupation 
had been to tend sheep. 

Slavery has existed among all, or nearly all, un- 
civilized nations. It was universal 

Hebrew 

among the peoples of antiquity. The s^^^^^- 
lives of the inhabitants of a conquered place were 



38 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

forfeited by the laws of war. They might, at the 
option of the captor, be reduced to slavery. Patri- 
archal slavery, as it is depicted in the Bible, was 
the mildest form of servitude. It was domestic 
slavery : the servant was one of the family, was a 
companion of the master, was brought into religious 
fellowship with him, and, like a feudal vassal, 
was armed in his defence. Slavery, as regu- 
lated by the Mosaic enactments, when compared 
with slavery as defined and practised under Roman 
law, or even among modern nations, was a humaue 
institution. A Hebrew might become a slave vol- 
untarily, on account of poverty, or he might be 
reduced to slavery as a penalty for theft. But his 
servitude was terminable by the satisfaction of just 
claims upon him, or by the recurrence of the year 
of jubilee, which emancipated all slaves of Hebrew 
extraction ; and, in any event, by the expiration of 
six years from the time when he became a slave. 
His master was enjoined to treat him not as '' a 
bond-servant,'^ but as " an hired servant,^' and 
^^not to rule over him with rigor.'' When his 
servitude came to an end, his master was forbidden 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 39 

"to, let him go away empty. '^ ^ With regard to 
marriage, a master might give to a Hebrew slave a 
non-Hebrew wife, herself a slave, for the time of 
his servitude ; but she and her children remained 
with the master, — a provision which, however 
harsh it may appear to us, was not harsh when 
compared with the ordinary codes and customs of 
slavery. A father might, for money, dispose of 
his daughter; but this was with a view to her 
marriage, and was one branch of the patria potestds, 
the paternal prerogative. The purchase-money 
might be looked upon somewhat in the light of a 
dower. Enactments were carefully made for her 
protection in case she did not become a wife of the 
one to whom she was given, or of his son.^ As 
regards non-Hebrew slaves, they might be manu- 
mitted. There were regulations for their protection 
and comfort, such as no other ancient nation framed. 
The wilful murder of a slave was visited with the 
same penalty as the murder of a freeman. A 



^ Exod. xxi. 2, seq. ; Deut. xv. 12-15. 
2 Exod. xxi. 7-10. 



40 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

serious injury, such as the loss of an eye or a tooth, 
was to be recompensed by giving the slave his 
liberty. Kidnapping, and the surrender of fugi- 
tive slaves flying from a heathen master, were 
punished. The general treatment of slaves under 
the Old-Testament law was gentle. The Hebrew 
is most emphatically commanded to be kind to the 
stranger, and not to maltreat or oppress him. 
" Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress 
him ; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.^^ 
'' For the Lord your God is a God of gods, and 
Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty and a terrible, 
which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward. 
He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless 
and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him 
food and raiment. Love ye, therefore, the stranger ; 
for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.^^ The 
slave, like his master, did no work one day in 
seven. He partook with the family in the most 
solemn acts of public worship. He even took part 
in the family festival of the Passover. There was 
no policy looking to the multiplying of slaves. 
There were no slave-markets. Israel was never a 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 41 

" slave-power ^' as were Athens, Rome, and other 
ancient states. 

We may pause for a moment to advert to the 
attitude of Christianity toward slavery. If Christi- 
anity had made war directly on the con- ^^ . ^. .^ 

•^ *' Christianity 

stitution of society, had undertaken to ^^^ Slavery. 
reduce the government of Nero to a moderate and 
legitimate exercise of authority, had attempted to 
define the distinction between just service and un- 
just servitude, — if Christianity had attempted these 
things, it would have had a short stay in the world. 
What did the apostles do ? They inculcated the 
golden rule. They insisted on the equality of men 
before God. They enjoined the exercise of justice 
and love. They taught that both master and slave 
had a Master in common, to whom both were 
answerable. They counselled slaves not to resist 
even harsh masters, but to bear their sufferings 
with patience and fortitude. They bade masters 
render to their bond-servants that which is just and 
equal. Paul sent back Onesimus to Philemon, no 
longer as a servant, but as a brother beloved. In 
a word, Christian ethics, or the bearings of the law 



42 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 

of love on social relations, were not developed in 
all their ramifications in a moment. They were 
left to be brought gradually to the consciousness 
of Christian men, and thus to be intelligently and 
peacefully realized in social organization. If Chris- 
tianity did not abolish slavery by an instantaneous 
decree, which would have been only a brutumfulmen^ 
it put gunpowder under the system. For it w^as the 
influence of the gospel which eventually abolished 
slavery in the Roman Empire and serfdom in the 
Middle Ages ; and it is the direct and indirect in- 
fluence of Christianity which has abolished modern 
slavery, notwithstanding the defence of it by un- 
discerning or interested clergymen and churches. 

We return to the Old Testament. There w^as 
one thing which the Hebrews were to regard with 
unsparing hatred. This was idolatry. 
Idolatry. They were the chosen people. They 
were chosen to be the recipients of a revelation ; to 
form a community in which the only living and 
true God should be alone worshipped, — through 
which monotheism should be planted on the earth, 
and a priceless gift be prepared for all nations. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 43 

What shall be said of the extermination of the 
Canaanites? The moral questions involved in this 
topic are so grave and momentous, that, Extermina- 
if it were to be discussed adequately, a canaanites. 
large space would be requisite for their full treat- 
ment. But I venture upon a few observations. 

In the first place, what reason is alleged for the 
driving out of these tribes, and for destroying them 
root and branch ? One reason was their Reasons for 

destroying 

unexampled vileness and impurity. An- t^em. 
other reason was the contamination which would 
make association with them the ruin of the Israel- 
ites. These old Canaanite tribes were steeped in a 
worse than brutal sensuality. The foulest incest 
was not the extreme point of their pollution. 
With this bestiality was joined a cruelty which 
made human sacrifices, the flinging of children 
alive into the flames to appease their gods, congenial 
to them.^ Many of them fled to Tyre and other 
Phoenician towns. From what we know of Carth- 
age, which was settled by Canaanite worshippers 

^ See Lev. xviii. 



44 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

of Baal and Ashtaroth, we can get an idea of the 
savage rites of their idolatry. In the flourishing 
days of that city, hundreds of innocent boys, be- 
longing to the best families, were thrown into the 
fire as a sacrifice to Moloch, the " horrid king '^ of 
the old Canaanite religion. '' The land is defiled : 
therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, 
and the land itself vomiteth forth its inhabitants.'^ ^ 
The Israelites were warned not to follow the course 
of the Canaanites, " That the land spew not you 
out, also, as it spewed out the nations that were 
before you.'' These degraded tribes were to be 
rooted out, " That they teach you not to do after 
all these abominations, which they have done unto 
their gods."^ 

In the second place, that the Israelites, animated 
with faith in the true God, taught to detest the 

Israelites' Unspeakable wickedness of the Canaan- 
sense of a . •Ill 
mission. ite tribcs, cousidcrcd themselves in- 
trusted with a mission to execute God's judgment 
upon them, to drive them out and destroy them, 

^ Lev. xviii. 25. ^ Deut. xx. 18. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 45 

and to make room for that true religion, of which 
they were the exckisive representatives on earth, is 
an historical fact. When they saw afterward the 
mischief that resulted from the influence of the 
remnant of the Canaanites that were left, they 
were confirmed in the conviction that their destruc- 
tion was the just ordinance of God. They felt that 
a sacred obligation rested on them to sweep the 
ground clean. 

In the third place, the beneficent results of re- 
vealed religion, the benefits which have gone forth 
to mankind, and appear in the Christian 

^ -■- ^ Beneficent 

civilization of to-day, were contingent, results. 
as far as we can judge, on the extermination of 
these tribes. I shall quote here from two accom- 
plished historical scholars, neither of whom can be 
accused of a lack of humane feeling, and neither 
of whom is wedded to traditional theological beliefs. 
Professor Goldwin Smith remarks on this topic of 
"the penal destruction of the Canaanites,'^ — 

" Had they been spared, and reduced to slavery, the result, 
judging from analogy, would have been the deep corruption 
of the chosen people. With abundance of slave-labor, the 



46 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

Jews would not have taken to industry, nor have acquired the 
virtues which industry alone can produce and guard. Their 
fate would have been like that of the Turks and other conquer- 
ing hordes of the East, which, the rush of conquest once over, 
have sunk into mere sloth and abject sensuality. And, if the 
morals of the Canaanites are truly painted in the Pentateuch, 
the possession of such slaves would have been depraving in the 
highest degree." 

More emphatic still are the words of Dr. Arnold : 

** It is better that the wicked should be destroyed a hundred 
times over than that they should tempt those who are as yet 
innocent to join their company. Let us but think what might 
have been our fate, and the fate of every nation under heaven 
at this hour, had the sword of the Israelites done its work 
more sparingly. Even as it was, the small portions of the 
Canaanites who were left, and the nations around them, so 
tempted the Israelites by their idolatrous practices, that we 
read continually of the whole people of God turning away 
from his service. But had the heathen lived in the land in 
equal numbers, and, still more, had they intermarried largely 
with the Israelites, how was it possible, humanly speaking, 
that any sparks of the light of God's truth should have sur- 
vived to the coming of Christ ? Would not the Israelites have 
lost all their peculiar character ? And, if they had retained 
the name of Jehovah as of their God, would they not have 
formed as unworthy notions of his attributes, and worshipped 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 47 

him with a worship as abominable as that which the Moabites 
paid to Chemosh, or the Philistines to Dagon ? 

" But this was not to be, and therefore, the nations of Canaan 
were to be cut off utterly. The Israelites^ sword, in its bloodiest 
executions, wrought a work of mercy for all the countries of 
the earth to the very end of the world. They seem of very 
small importance to us now, those perpetual contests with the 
Canaanites and the Midianites and the Ammonites and the 
Philistines, with which the Books of Joshua and Judges and 
Samuel are almost filled. We may half wonder that God 
should have interfered in such quarrels, or have changed the 
course of nature, in order to give one of these nations of Pales- 
tine the victory over another. But, in these contests, on the 
fate of one of these nations of Palestine the happiness of the 
human race depended. The Israelites fought not for them- 
selves only, but for us. It might follow that they should thus 
be accounted the enemies of all mankind ; it might be that 
they were tempted by their very distinctness to despise other 
nations : still they did God's work ; still they preserved un- 
hurt the seed of eternal life, and were the ministers of blessing 
to all other nations, even though they themselves failed to 
enjoy it." ^ 

It is pertinent to remind the reader that acts 
occurring in recent times resembling the destruction 

^ Quoted by Stanley : " History of the Jewish Church/* L, 
283. 



48 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

of the Canaanites have been approved, whether 
justly or not, by writers of high repute. Of the 
massacre by Cromwell at the siege of Drogheda, 
Carlyle says, — 

^' Oliver's proceedings have been the theme of much loud 
criticism and sibylline execration, into which it is not our 
plan to enter at present. Terrible surgery this ; but is it 
surgery and judgment, or atrocious murder merely ? That is 
a question which should be asked, or answered. Oliver Crom- 
well did believe in God's judgments, and did not believe in 
the rose-water plan of surgery ; which, in fact, is this editor's 
case too. . . . An armed soldier solemnly conscious to himself 
that he is the soldier of God the Just, — a consciousness which 
it well beseems all soldiers and all men to have always, — 
armed soldier, terrible as Death, relentless as Doom ; doing 
God's judgments on the enemies of God ! It is a phenomenon 
not of a joyful nature ; no, but of awful, to be looked at with 
pious terror and awe." 

In the fourth place, as far as the effect upon the 

Israelites of this war of extermination is concerned, 

there was no woundino: of sensibility. 

Effect on the ^ -^ 

Israelites. There was no such departure from the 
prevalent ideas and the prevalent usages of war, as 
would produce a moral deterioration in the Israelites 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 49 

themselves. Rather is it true, that, feeling them- 
selves the deputies of the Supreme God for the 
infliction of righteous penalties, and for carrying 
out his purpose, they would perform their stern 
task with a kind of sacred enthusiasm, distinct 
from personal revenge and malice, and impressed 
at every step with their own exposure to a like 
retribution in case they should fall back into the 
pollutions of heathenism. An act which, though 
enjoined by just authority, and in its ultimate 
results beneficent, it might not have been possible 
for a people on a higher stage of moral develop- 
ment to perform without a hardening effect on 
themselves, the Israelites could do with no such 
consequence flowing from it. 

As to the Canaanites themselves, they endured a 
retribution which has often been inflicted, in the 
ordinary course of Providence, on cor- 

• -I Analogies. 

rupt and enervated races, going down 
before the power of a more vigorous invading 
people. In the case before us the Supreme Euler 
employed human instruments directly designated, 
and therefore justly empowered, for the purpose. 



50 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

Yet on this view it may still be said with truth 
that the injunction to drive out the barbarian tribes 
took the form that it did on account of ^Hhe hard- 
ness of their hearts/^ Had they been more sus- 
ceptible to gentler motives^ less inclined themselves 
to sink into debasing idolatry, and had their moral 
sense been capable of discriminations which Christi- 
anity has made familiar, the mission given to them 
might have been different. It might then have 
been as safe for Israelites to mingle with the heathen 
as it was in later ages, when no seductions and no 
terrors could move them to take part in idolatry. 

I am not satisfied that the foregoing remarks do 
not embrace the elements of a fair solution of the 
problem presented by this page of the 
solution. ^^QYQdi history. But if any think that 
this solution, in the light of the gospel, by which 
every thing is to be judged, is insufficient, the 
alternative remains to consider — not the abhorrence 
of idolatry, not the disposition to put far from them 
its orgies and pollutions — but the connected im- 
pulse to destroy and exterminate which those feel- 
ings engendered, as not inspired of God, but as a 



THE CHRISTIAN BELIGION. 51 

natural impulse and emotion on that stage of moral 
discernment which^ on the one hand, was elevated 
above the obtuseness of conscience out of which 
they had been lifted by the light of revelation, and, 
on the other hand, was not so far elevated above it 
as to enable them to think of other means of attain- 
ing the desired end. On this theory another view 
must be taken respecting the inspiration of these 
passages in the record. They must be considered 
as reflecting the judgment of the men of "the old 
time^^ respecting the deed of the Israelites. That 
deed must be held to have sprung, not from an 
explicit injunction, but from the dictate of a holy, 
yet imperfectly holy, sentiment. The espousal of 
this view, however, does not deprive a man of the 
title of Christian. Whether true or false, it can 
be held consistently with the belief that Jesus Christ 
is the Son of God and the Saviour of the world. 
This belief it is which makes a man a Christian.^ 

To sum up what I have to say here upon the Old- 
Testament system: It was a national religion. 

1 Matt. xvi. 16-18 ; John iv. 42, vi. 69. 



52 THE CHRISTIAN EELIGIOK 

Without a stupendous and continuous miracle, in 
no other way could the true religion get a foot- 
The Old hold ou the earth. But miracle is not 

Testament , at • n t • 

system. magic. At that time all religions were 

tribal. The Hebrews were organized by the act 
of God into a theocratic community. He assumed 
toward them the relation of a lawgiver. His legis- 
lation, given through prophets, extended over all 
matters of which government was expected to take 
cognizance. Idolatry was weeded out by express 
enactments. Apostasy from God was at once im- 
piety and treason. Penalties were inflicted upon 
overt irreligion, not through the agency of natural 
law only, as on the broad field of the world, but 
through civil law, which was acknowledged to 
emanate directly from God. The uncivilized in- 
stincts of men were more and more curbed by 
wholesome enactments adapted to their condition. 
Increasing disclosures of the character of God puri- 
fied the popular conception of him. As revelation 
advanced, the standard of piety and morality rose 
to a higher grade. Holiness came to be a word 
full of the most sacred meaning. Conscience was 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 53 

disciplined. Aspirations for a nearer access to God, 
for a wider reign of God, were awakened. A more 
full revelation was anticipated in the dim future. 
To the future the longing eyes of men were turned. 
At length the day came for the true religion to burst 
through the bonds of its political form and its ex- 
ternal ritual. The true King, the hope of prophecy, 
appeared, not as the head of a single commonwealth, 
but as the Lord and Redeemer of mankind. Theoc- 
racy reached the ideal to which it had pointed, and 
toward which it had striven, from the beginning. 

7. In presenting the evidences of Christianity, 
the facts are first to be established. The facts 
which are principally called in question 

^ ^ *> J- Miracles 

are the miracles recorded in the Gospels, and Theism 
An atheist cannot credit the narrative of a miracle, 
for he knows of no power competent to perform 
one. A deist who believes in an idle deity who 
lets the world go on of itself, and takes little inter- 
est in the well-being of men, will distrust all testi- 
mony to miracles, be it as cogent as testimony ever 
can be. But a theist, whose God is a benevolent 
Being and pities human distress, even the distress 



54 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 

of those who have wilfully forsaken him, will 
regard a revelation as not improbable, and miracles, 
a part and evidence of it, as not unlikely to 
occur. 

Without considering, for the present, questions 
relating to the authorship and date of the Gospels, 
^ ^ ^ it is affirmed to be impossible to account 

Proof of ^ 

miracles. £^j, ^^^^ beginnings of Christianity, and 
for facts which every sensible person admits respect- 
ing Christ, his teaching, and the foundation of the 
Church, without allowing that miracles such as are 
narrated in the Gospels, including his resurrection, 
were actually wrought. The known fact — a fact 
attested by the Apostle PauV an unimpeachable 
witness — that the apostles themselves professed to 
work miracles by a power derived from Christ 
makes it highly probable that they believed mira- 
cles to have been wrought by him. What made 
them believe this, if they had not seen them? 
Repeated injunctions of Christ not to report his 
miracles are an obviously authentic part of the 

1 Gal. iii. 4 : 2 Cor. xii. 12. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 55 

gospel history ; and this proves that the events to 
which these injunctions refer actually took place. 
Cautions, plainly authentic, proceeding from him, 
addressed to his disciples, against making too much 
of miracles, are a proof that they were actually 
wrought. There is teaching of Christ, the authen- 
ticity of which cannot reasonably be disputed, 
which is meaningless unless certain miracles were 
the occasion of it. An example is the message sent 
to John the Baptist, when he inquired if Jesus were 
really the Christ (Matt. xi. 4 ; Luke vii. 22). Other 
examples are conversations of Jesus with over-rigid 
observers of the sabbath : they complained that he 
had healed the sick on that holy day. His answer 
on one occasion (Luke xiv. 5) implies that the heal- 
ing was of a desperate malady. The charge that 
Jesus cast out demons by Beelzebub proves that he 
restored demoniacs, like the madman of Gadara, to 
reason and health. The resort to this imputation 
proves that the cures of this kind which he wrought 
were not parallel with any exorcisms with which 
the Jews were familiar. The fact that not a miracle 
is attributed to John the Baptist should convince one 



66 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

that the miracles attributed to Jesus were really 
done. John was considered by the apostles inferior 
to none of the prophets. Why are not marvellous 
works connected with the accounts of him? Why 
are no miracles ascribed to Jesus himself before his 
public ministry? The later apocryphal Gospels do 
this, but not the Gospels of the canon. It is im- 
possible to explain the faith of Jesus in himself as 
the Messiah, or the persevering faith of the disciples 
in him, if he wrought no miracles. Strauss called 
the miracles myths, growing out of the fixed expec- 
tation that the Messiah, when he should come, 
would do such works. How, then, could they con- 
sider Jesus the Messiah if he did not do them ? To 
one who studies the gospel history, it is plain that 
miracles enter into the nexus of well-attested occur- 
rences, and cannot be dissected out of it. The 
TheMiracie crowuiug miraclc of Christianity — the 

of the Res- . 

urrection. rcsurrcctiou of Jcsus — IS supportcd by 
proof which cannot be invalidated. Everybody 
who knows anything about the subject will con- 
cede that the unanimous faith of the apostles in the 
resurrection, as having occurred the third day after 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 57 

his death, is the cause of the continued existence of 
Christianity beyond that date. Whether Christi- 
anity should survive or perish turned on that pivot. 
To explain that belief of the apostles, for which 
they were ready to lay down their lives, — ^that 
inspiring belief which raised them from the depths 
of despondency, and transformed them from timid 
fugitives to courageous heralds, going forth to con- 
front and conquer all opposition, — ^to explain this 
belief, if it was not founded on fact, is a tough 
problem for scepticism to solve. The Apostle Paul, 
who was converted in the year 35, about five years 
after the crucifixion ; who, three years later, spent 
a fortnight with Peter at Jerusalem ;^ who was con- 
versant at the time with the testimony given by the 
apostles, — presents in detail the successive manifes- 
tations of Jesus to them and to the other disciples; 
in one instance, to five hundred at once.^ These 
interviews were a definite number : they began at a 
certain time ; they ceased altogether at a certain 
time. This circumstance, taken in connection with 

1 Gal. i. 18. ^ 1 Cor. xv. 1-18. 



58 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

all the other phenomena which no candid sceptic 
will deny to have entered into the testimony of the 
apostles on this subject, excludes the theory of hal- 
lucination. Moreover, the psychological conditions 
which it would be necessary to assume in order to 
render self-delusion possible on their part were 
wholly wanting. They were mourning as for a lost 
cause. Nothing but an objective event of the most 
impressive character could have revived their spirit, 
and produced that revulsion of feeling out of which 
the whole subsequent history of the Christian reli- 
gion sprang.^ 

An objection to the credibility of the gospel mir- 
acles is often drawn from the fabulous miracles 
which abound in the records of pag-an 

Objection ^ ° 

uious^^^ antiquity, and in the legends of the 

mirRcles 

saints. The objection is plausible; but 
it is fallacious in logic, and is based on a superficial 
resemblance. The miracles of the gospel are for a 
higher end : they are for the purpose of revelation. 

^ For a full discussion of the credibility of the miracles, 
gee my work, The Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 59 

They mark the opening epochs in the establish- 
ment of the kingdom of God on earth. For the 
diffusion of that kingdom they are not required. 
Again, the miracles of the gospel were not wrought 
in coincidence with a prevailing system, and for 
the furtherance of it. They had not the enthu- 
siasm of believers, and their already established 
faith behind them. They created that faith, they 
kindled that enthusiasm. This is a most significant 
difference. Moreover, the temptations to fraud in 
the case of ecclesiastical miracles are such as had 
no place when Christianity was first introduced by 
Christ and the apostles. The qualifications of the 
witnesses to mediaeval and patristic marvels cannot 
for a moment be compared to those possessed by 
the disciples of Jesus. Any one may see this who 
will take the trouble to read the contemporary 
lives of St. Francis. Once more, the gospel mira- 
cles were none of them merely tentative. There 
were not a few instances of miraculous cure con- 
nected with numerous failures, as in the case of the 
Jansenist miracles, referred to by Hume. Had 
this been the fact, vigilant enemies would have 



60 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 

blazoned it abroad at once. I do not dwell on the 
grotesque character of the ecclesiastical miracles as 
a class, in comparison with the dignity of those 
narrated in the Gospels ; nor do I touch on other 
points of disparity which put credulous chroniclers 
of antiquity and of the Middle Ages in an utterly 
diverse category as regards trustworthiness from 
that held by the founders and first teachers of the 
Christian religion. 

Thus far I have spoken of miracles without 
specially considering the origin of the Gospels. 
Genuine- That we havc in these narratives the 

ness of the 

Gospels. testimony substantially, to say the least, 
as it was given by the apostles, there is no valid 
reason to doubt. To begin with the manuscripts : 
The allegation that because we have not the origi- 
nal documents we do not know whether the copies 
extant are not falsified, can only come from sheer 
ignorance. It is impossible to account for the 
agreement of the manuscripts which exist, including 
the most ancient Uncials, — to make no account 
here of the minor diversities which give occasion 
for textual criticism, — without concluding that they 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 61 

correspond to the original compositions, and to the 
copies in use in the lifetime of the authors.^ It is 
a sufficient answer to illiterate objections of this 
sort, that we have better proofs of the integrity of 
the Gospels than of any other ancient writings. 
They were in use by numerous widely scattered 
societies. These could not have conspired, had 
they been so disposed, to corrupt the text. They 
appeared in early translations, as the Peshito, or 
Syrian, and the old Italic, the basis, in part, of the 
Vulgate. They are quoted by a body of ancient 
ecclesiastical authors in the East and West. It is 
enough to say, that, if one questions the integrity 
of the Gospels, he ought never to quote a line of 
Homer, no complete manuscript of whom is older 
than the thirteenth century. He ought never to 
cite Marcus Aurelius, or Plato, or any other 
heathen sage. In truth, he should never refer to 
ancient history ; for the bulk of our information re- 



^ For the proof in detail, see Norton's " Genuineness of the 
Gospels," or my article, "How the New Testament came 
down to us," in " Scribner's Monthly," February, 1881. 



62 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 

specting it is derived directly from ancient writers, 
whose autograph manuscripts perished long ago, 
and were documents concerning which we have 
generally far less evidence than we have respecting 
the writings of the New Testament. 

As to the authorship of the Gospels^ I will stat^ 
what I believe to be the outcome of sound and im- 
Authorship partial critical study. The second Gos- 

of the 

Gospels. pel^ which many now think to have 

been the first written, is the work of Mark, who 
was for a time a companion of the Apostle Peter, 
and, perhaps, has transferred some part of that 
apostle's vivacity to his pages. On the ground of 
a comparison of the contents of Mark and Matthew, 
some have contended that not quite all of the 
second Gospel in its present form emanated from 
Mark, but that a portion of the matter was, at an 
early day, added by some other hand. I see no 
good reason for this opinion. There are no traces 
of a proto-Mark in antiquity. The third Gospel 
and the Book of Acts were written by a Gentile 
Christian, who journeyed for a time with the 
Apostle Paul, and whose affirmation that he had 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 63 

gathered his knowledge of the words and actions 
of Christ from eye-witnesses, is entitled to full 
credit. The first Gospel is ascribed to Matthew 
by the early Christian writers without dissent, 
although it is said to have been first written in the 
Hebrew language, and it is thought now to have 
received some additional matter from the early 
disciple, whoever he was, who transferred it into 
Greek. It existed in Greek at the date when it is 
spoken of by Papias, a contemporary of the Apos- 
tle John. There is internal evidence which, in my 
judgment, is of a most convincing character, that 
these three Gospels existed in their present form 
about A. D. 70, or when some of the apostles, and 
a multitude whom they had taught, were still 
living. The genuineness of the Gospel of John 
has been of late persistently, but, as I think, 
unsuccessfully assailed. If there are difficulties 
connected with the supposition of its genuineness, 
there are far greater difficulties attending the 
opposite hypothesis. Only one fact belonging to 
the external evidence may here be given. Irenseus, 
a man of unquestioned probity. Bishop of Lyons 



64 THE CHRISTIAN EELIGIOK 

in the latter part of the second century, by whom, 
as by all of his contemporaries, the fourth Gospel 
was received without doubt or question, had per- 
sonally known in the East the martyr Polycarp, 
Bishop of Smyrna, and had heard him describe 
the appearance and manners of the Apostle John, 
whom Polycarp had personally known at Ephesus, 
where the apostle spent his closing years. It is 
morally impossible that Irenseus received a Gospel 
as from John which Polycarp knew nothing of, or 
that Polycarp could have been mistaken on a point 
like this. 

When all the literary evidence is scanned, and 
all the collateral proofs weighed, the conclusion 
The apos- will bc that wc havc presented to us in 

ties' testi- 
mony, the Gospels the story which the apostles 

told of what they had seen and heard in their 
intercourse with Jesus. In these inartificial narra- 
tives the testimony of the original disciples is 
fairly laid before us. 

The question recurs, Are the apostles to be be- 
lieved ? If not, shall we say that they are knaves 
or that they are fools ? The idea of their being 



. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 65 

knaves, who were so anxious to become ^* the off- 
scouring of all things ^^ that they made up a lie, — 
made up a lie for the pleasure of dying credibility 

of the 

for it, — this idea is happily obsolete, apostles. 
But were they fools ? Were they half-crazed enthu- 
siasts who imagined that they saw such things as 
the cure of the leper after the sermon on the mount, 
or the stopping of the bier at Nain, and the raising 
from the dead of the widow's son, when no such 
things occurred ? Did Jesus, then, who is lauded 
as a great reformer, as one who knew human 
nature, a teacher of pre-eminent wisdom, select a 
band of fools for his chosen companions, to make 
up his family ? And did he choose them for the 
express purpose of observing what he should say 
and do, that they might go forth and relate it to 
others? In what light does this theory place 
Christ ? Turn to the narratives : were there ever 
stronger marks of truth ? Artless, with no effort 
to parry objections, or anticipate cavils, the manner 
of the writers is that of honest men. The narra- 
tive given by the apostles is objective : they are 
taken up in the subject-matter ; they are oblivious 



66 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

of the bearing of what they relate on their own 
repute; they tell their own faults, their own 
unfaithfulness to Christ, their cowardice, treachery, 
desertion. They set down the sharp rebukes which 
they received from his lips. There is no eifort at 
conceahnent, nor is there any trace of exaggeration. 
There are none of the exclamations of wonder, 
none of the expletives and asseverations which 
belong to fictitious testimony. All is simple, 
unadorned, marked with the unmistakable signs of 
truthfulness. These are witnesses before whose eyes 
great and wonderful things have passed, — so great 
and wonderful that in the presence of them all 
personal considerations are lost out of sight. If 
the portrait which they incidentally present of 
Jesus in his transcendent purity and goodness — a 
portrait in which divine authority, and power 
above that of men, are strangely yet inseparably 
mingled with human meekness and sympathy — 
does not correspond to a reality which they had 
seen and known, then who gave to these unprac- 
tised authors, to these apostolic witnesses, destitute 
of artistic skill, the ability to produce such a mar- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 67 

vellous creation of fancy? If this be, indeed, 
their creation, let us worship them ! 

8. What shall be said of the objection to the 
credibility of the Gospels from alleged discrep- 
ancies ? The first thins: to be said is 

*^ Discrep- 

that the objection is irrelevant. Dis- and in- 

-, . •11 , accuracies. 

crepancies and inaccuracies belong to 
almost all testimony. On the principle that a 
witness or an author is to be discredited if he fails 
of accuracy in all particulars, it would be impos- 
sible to believe any thing. Courts of law would 
have to be shut up. All books of history, includ- 
ing narratives written from personal observation, — 
much more, such as are based on them, — would be 
worthless. Paley, one of the ablest defenders of 
Christianity in the last century, justly says, " I 
know not a more rash or unphilosophical conduct 
of the understanding than to reject the substance 
of a story by reason of some diversity in the 
circumstances with which it is related. The usual 
character of human testimony is substantial truth 
under circumstantial variety. This is what the 
daily experience of courts of justice teaches. When 



68 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

accounts of a transaction come from the mouths of 
different witnesses^ it is seldom that it is not possible 
to pick out apparent or real inconsistencies between 
them. These inconsistencies are studiously dis- 
played by an adverse pleader, but oftentimes with 
little impression upon the minds of the judges. 
On the contrary, a close and minute agreement 
induces the suspicion of confederacy and fraud.'^ 
Contemporary historians, although honest and 
painstaking, usually fail to accord with one another 
in some particulars of the narrative. They may 
differ as regards quite important circumstances, and 
yet their general credibility not be shaken. The 
accounts of the assassination of Julius Caesar con- 
tain numerous discrepancies ; so it is with the 
ancient narratives of the murder of Cicero. Yet 
Caesar and Cicero were killed, and the main cir- 
cumstances can be w^ell ascertained, and even minor 
particulars arrived at, by a comparison of authorities. 
Some maintain that Colonel Prescott commanded at 
Bunker Hill ; others that General Putnam was in 
tlie chief command. However the question may 
be determined, or, if it cannot be determined, there 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 69 

is no doubt that a conflict occurred there, and no 
doubt as to the essential facts. Macaulay^s his- 
tory of England is not made worthless because 
he confounded William Penn, the Quaker, with 
George Penn, the pardon-broker. Where varia- 
tions occur in testimony, or inaccuracies in any 
single witness or reporter, the only question is 
whether they are of such a number and character 
as to destroy the general trustworthiness of the 
narrators, and to cast doubt on the substantial con- 
tents of their tale. If not, they may furnish 
material for a pettifogger to deal with, but they 
will have no weight with a discerning judge or an 
intelligent critic. 

Applying these principles to the evangelists, we 
shall find that their general credibility is rather 
confirmed than weakened by the blem- 

•^ Method 

ishes alleged to exist in their narratives. ^^ stiauss. 
It is true that Strauss and critics of that stamp 
have tried to break down this testimony by making 
a parade of verbal differences, and by opposing a 
clause taken from one author against a clause 
picked out of another. It is true of Strauss^ as of 



70 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

many others, that he reasons often in a circle, im- 
peaching one author on account of the statement of 
another whom he likewise impeaches. The method, 
as thus pursued, is a sophistical one, and is parallel 
to instances of artificial harmonizing which well- 
meaning but ill-judging defenders of the Gospels 
have sometimes resorted to in order to remove real 
or apparent inconsistencies. Our historian, Mr. 
Prescott, began to read Strauss, but soon laid aside 
the book on account of the false and unfair method 
which marks the discussion, — a method subversive 
of the canons of sound historical criticism. 

Whatever opinion is entertained on the question 
whether the narrations in the Gospel histories admit 
Substantial of being rcconcilcd in all particulars, — 

truth of the 

Gospels. a question on which Christian scholars 

are still divided, — it can be clearly shown that in 
numerous instances where it has been pretended 
that contradictions exist, this opinion is erroneous. 
It must be remembered that these books are not 
formal histories. They are memoirs. There is no 
aim at completeness. They are not from the pen 
of expert writers. Circumstances, even very im- 



THE CHRISTIAN EELIGIOK 71 

portant facts, may be left out of one and recorded 
by another. In narratives of this character, 
whether oral or written, there is often an appear- 
ance of inconsistency where some additional circum- 
stance not introduced would at once dispel this 
appearance. One has only to observe the narra- 
tives of daily occurrences as they are given by one^s 
friends who are possessed of an average degree of 
accuracy, to discern the fallacy and unfairness of 
much of the adverse criticism of the Gospels. But, 
as I have intimated above, if no single transaction 
were described by any two evangelists, either in 
precise agreement with one another, or in precise 
correspondence to the facts, no inference could be 
drawn against the substantial truthfulness of their 
narratives. The fact would compel a modification 
of a conception of inspiration which many entertain, 
but would leave the essential facts in the life of Jesus, 
his miracles and resurrection included, untouched. 

9. We leave the gospel history to glance at Chris- 
tianity on the doctrinal side. Chris- „ , 

•^ Redemption 

tianity is the religion of redemption. It ^^^ ^^^' 
rests on the presupposition of theism, and stands or 



72 THE CHRISTIAN EELIGIOK 

falls with it. The being of God being acknowl- 
edged, the one postulate of Christianity is the "doc- 
trine of sin. In affirming that sin is a dominating 
principle, or in declaring the general sinfulness of 
mankind, the gospel brings forward a truth made 
evident by the individuaPs personal consciousness 
and observation, implied in the laws, customs, 
languages, and literature of the world, and mani- 
fested in the entire history of the race. Christi- 
anity does not create moral evil. On this subject 
of human wickedness it does nothing more than 
reiterate what the foremost of heathen poets and 
philosophers have united in asserting. Seneca is as 
severe in the accusation which he brings against 
mankind as Paul, though the Stoic's moral abhor- 
rence of the guilt which he denounces is less intense. 
Those who find fault with Christian teaching 
seldom avoid implying a prevalence of sin w^hich 
they will not consent explicitly to allow. We hear 
them call slavery "a hideous crime,'' the sum of 
abominations. But slavery, up to a recent day, 
has existed almost everywhere, and in all ages. Tlie 
class of oppressors w^ho are directly responsible for 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 73 

it have been strong enough and numerous enough 
to hold their victims in subjection. It has com- 
monly been true that the slave has been ready, at 
any time, to take, when he could, the position of a 
master. Mankind, then, have been engaged, from 
the dawn of history, in the perpetration of what is 
termed a hideous crime. Wars of conquest are 
denounced as flagrantly wicked. But war has been 
the great business of the race, and no homage, no 
honors, no rewards have been so great as those 
bestowed on the conqueror. What are generally 
deemed the purest religions are charged with having 
incorporated into their sacred books, their creed 
and rites, features indicative of the direst cruelty. 
What must be the moral condition of a race whose 
theology and worship are said to be the offspring 
of cruel and vindictive passions? Christianity 
broaches no new doctrine when it teaches that moral 
unworthiness belongs, though in different degrees, 
to men in common; that evil-doing is the habit of 
the race, though responsibility and guilt are per- 
sonal. If there be a mystery in the universality 
of sin, viewed in connection with personal agency 



74 THE CHRISTIAN RELIOIOK 

as its necessary source, and the condition, mie qud 
non, of its guilt, it is not a mystery which the gos- 
pel originates. It inheres in the facts, which are 
as patent to the enlightened heathen as to the Chris- 
tian, and stare every man in the face. Christianity 
brings out in a clear light the identity of sin as a 
principle, although Stoicism was not blind to this 
truth. Unrighteous anger is not literally murder ; 
but it is, in a minor degree, the same evil which in 
murder appears full-grown. It is murder in the 
germ. Ambition is not avarice ; but both are alike 
selfish. Take what specific form it may, sin is a 
violation of righteous law, a disregard of rightful 
authority, a preference of a narrow interest to the 
universal good. All moral obligations are so bound 
together that he who oifends in one point is guilty 
of all. Law is one, and love is one, and love is the 
law. Christianity, as it recognizes the love of God 
as the first and supreme duty, traces all special 
forms of excessive self-love and evil-doing to the 
separation of man from communion with God. 
Here is the fons et origo maloriim. In the void 
created in the human soul by the renunciation and 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 75 

loss of God^ all idolatries have their origin ; not 
merely the worship of deities devised by the imagi- 
nation, but the idolatry of the world, — the inordinate 
love of pleasure, power, fame, wealth. Ethics has 
the springs of its life in religion. Morality, divorced 
from religion, is a plant cut off from its root. It 
may retain its freshness and fragrance for a time ; 
but in time it withers and perishes. This idea of 
the moral and spiritual life of man as having its 
living source in man^s fellowship with God, in whom 
he lives, is one pervading idea of the Bible. It is a 
vital bond between the Old Testament and the New. 
It makes Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, and all 
the worshippers of God in the old time, even when 
their ethical development was as crude and imper- 
fect as their agriculture or architecture, of one com- 
pany with John and Paul and the holiest of Chris- 
tian saints. Christianity has no hope for mankind, 
whether as individuals or communities, except in 
the return of mankind to God. It looks on men 
who stand in no relation of affectionate loyalty to 
God as wasting their substance in a far country, 
and summons them back to the Father^s house. 



76 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGIOK 

Christianity is for sinners. '' They that are whole 
need no physician/^ He who will think earnestly 
enough to grasp^ in its full reality, the fact of sin, 
is prepared at least to understand Christianity. 

Communion with God is mediated and restored 
through Jesus Christ. He is sent to save that which 
Person and was lost. He camc uot to fulmiuatc a 

Work of 

Christ. deserved sentence of condemnation ; he 

came not to condemn, but to save the world. His 
function is to break down walls of separation, the 
separation of men from each other, the alienation 
of mankind from God. No work so sublime was 
ever undertaken on the earth. It is to form a 
universal society, the bond of which is love. It is 
to organize a spiritual community, embracing the 
race of man, and having its centre in himself, — a 
society to be trained for a future and perfect develop- 
ment of human nature in an immortal state. He 
who is to effect the re-union of man to God is him- 
self the Son of God as well as the Son of man. 
There is a mysterious community of being with the 
Father, an inscrutable derivation distinct from that 
of all creaturely existences, of which the human 



THE CHRISTIAN EELIGIOK 77 

relation of sonship is to finite apprehension the 
most expressive symbol. There is an incarnation^ 
a great act of self-sacrifice. That nature of the 
Deity which is called, in the technical language of 
theology, the Trinity, is a mysterious truth. That is, 
it is a truth with regard to which we know that it is, 
also to a certain extent what it is, but not hoio it 
is. We know that a plant grows from the seed ; 
we know that it grows, but very imperfectly how it 
grows. We know that bodies attract each other in 
the inverse ratio of the square of their distances. 
We know that a result takes place, but not in the 
least how it takes place: "attraction'^ is a figure of 
speech. So of the connection of soul and body, and 
of a thousand other things. So true is it that omne 
exit in mysterium. We may know that two attri- 
butes co-exist in an entity, but how they do or can 
we may be ignorant. A mysterious truth may be 
clear in its practical relations. It is thus with the 
divine sonship of Christ. Endowed with all human 
sensibilities, exposed to temptation, he devotes him- 
self, in obedience to the will of God, to the task of 
bearing witness for him, and with an absorbing 



78 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

sympathy to the work of bringiog men to repent- 
ance. In the prosecution of this work his love to 
God and man, though always without flaw, is 
developed, in the experiences of life and of death, 
to an absolute perfection. On the cross he par- 
takes of death, the wages of sin, and through the 
absolute self-devotion of sympathy attains to such 
a living apprehension of man's guilt and ill-desert, 
and of the condemnation of sin felt in the divine 
mind, that through the cross the communion be- 
tween him, and between mankind as represented in 
him, and the holy and loving God, reaches its con- 
summation. It is a communion in which there is 
a full, intelligent sanction, on man's side, of the 
justice of God in the penal allotment of death, and 
in his righteous displeasure, at sin. Thus in Christ, 
as a centre, communion between God and man was 
restored. In the case of all who enter into the 
work of Christ with sympathy, which is a work 
done not for himself but for his fellow-men, there 
is a guaranty that pardon will not be mistaken for 
indulgence. There is a guaranty that from him 
will go forth upon those who give up their isolated 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 79 

iudividuality^ and seek for a new life in fellowship 
with him^ an influence adequate not only to implant 
and sustain a filial allegiance to God, but to infuse 
into conscience a sense of his holy anger at sin, as 
vivid as if they had themselves been visited with 
the punishment due to their sins. It is not strange 
if there should be questions respecting the atone- 
ment which neither man nor angel can answer. 
To say that the atonement makes God placable is 
false. ^^He so loved the world/^ etc. It is no 
bribe to an unmerciful judge. It is not a commer- 
cial transaction, a price paid for a dispensation of 
pardon. It is a substitute for punishment, embracing 
in it certain elements of punishment itself, and doing 
for the satisfaction of God's own feeling, for the 
moral order disturbed by the violation of law, and 
thus for the protection of authority and the preven- 
tion of transgressions in the future, a work like that 
which the infliction of the curse threatened by con- 
science and the law would fulfil. As to the vicarious 
feature of the atonement, its analogies are seen 
wherever w^e look, — in families and the succession 
of generations, in the entailment of evils and bless- 



80 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 

ings, and even in material nature all around us where 
life springs out of death. '' Except a corn of wheat 
fall into the ground, it abideth alone/^ The call for 
an unconditioned absolution, with no correlated 
work for the manifestation and vindication of just- 
ice, is not a call that comes up from the human soul 
when it is deeply penetrated with a sense of guilt. 
Criminals, when their consciences have been aroused, 
and they have been struck with the iniquity of their 
deeds, have preferred to suffer the penalty. When 
a terrible crime is committed, which spreads grief 
and dismay through a nation, men demand, if the 
perpetrator was sane and responsible, that the pen- 
alty should be inflicted in its full severity. This 
demand springs not merely or chiefly from a regard 
for public safety : it is the voice of nature asserting 
an eternal fitness of things. Who dare say, then, 
that if sin is remitted, if the transgressor is ap- 
proached with offers of forgiveness, there ought not 
to be a corresponding revelation of the sanctities of 
justice? Who dare say that the process of recon- 
ciliation ought not to include something of the nature 
of expiation ? It is easy to caricature these things. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 81 

It is easy to paint the righteous anger of God against 
evil-doing as a personal feeling, a passion, instead 
of the holy, impersonal sentiment of conscience. It 
is easy to represent the atonement as suffering im- 
posed on the innocent One, when it was suffering 
voluntarily assumed and endured by him. There 
is no element in the atonement which may not be 
distorted by ignorance or by prejudice. Against 
all theoretical objections, there is the fact that mil- 
lions of human beings have found in it a reconcili- 
ation to God in which nothing of his fatherly 
character is obscured, while the perception of the 
guilt and peril of sin has been increasingly deepened 
instead of being dulled. 

By the moral victory achieved on the cross, there 
was a liberation from death. When sin was ex- 
pelled from human nature in the person Fruits of 

r» 1 -r» • r> 1 *^® Resur- 

of the Representative of mankmd, who rection. 
thereby stored up in himself a potency of spiritual 
life, of holiness and goodness, for the race of which 
he was the head, or the second Adam, the resur- 
rection was a normal consequence. Set free from 
the limitations of space and time, while retaining 



82 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

all human sympathies and the fruits of a human 
experience perfected on the cross, he can act from 
the spiritual sphere with a more wide-spread effi- 
ciency. He is the herald, the type, the author of 
a perfected humanity. The kingdom of God, in 
consequence of the glorified form of being which 
belongs to its head, attains to its universal stage, 
where there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor 
free, male nor female, and in which neither to 
Jerusalem nor Mount Gerizim is it needful to 
resort for the worship of the Father. How sub- 
Progress Hmc is the progress of that kingdom ! 

of the •11 

kingdom. ^e cau tracc it back to the remote age 
when a single nomad chief, having a living faith in 
the true God, broke away from his home and 
kindred, and wandered over the hills of Palestine. 
AYe can look on it many centuries later, when it 
was threatened with complete destruction by colos- 
sal empires on its borders, when its narrow strip of 
territory was trampled down by their invading 
armies, when its people were deported in a mass to 
foreign lands to serve heathen masters, when it 
seemed on the verge of utter extinction, but when, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 83 

even in the darkest hours, its prophets proclaimed 
that it would rise from the dust, and would over- 
spread the whole earth. We behold it in the final 
stage of its development, when the predicted King, 
with only a handful of Galilean peasants for his 
followers, declared that against it the powers of 
Hades — ^the powers of death and destruction which 
swallow up every thing earthly — should never pre- 
vail. We observe the kingdom growing as from a 
grain of mustard-seed, diffusing its power as leaven 
hidden in measures of meal, travelling from land 
to land, supplanting ancient religions, surviving, in 
full vigor, the rise and fall of nations. We open 
the New Testament, and find that " it breathes in 
every page boundless hope for the future, together 
with the charity which is the source of social effort, 
and with the faith which carries each man beyond 
the sensual objects of his own short life. And it 
closes with that splendid vision of the consumma- 
tion of all Christian effort in the perfect reign of 
God on earth, from which folly attempts to cast, 
like an astrologer, the horoscope of nations ; but 
which is in truth the last voice of Christianity, as 



84 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

it passes from the hands of the apostles, and com- 
mits itself to the dark and dangerous tide of 
human affairs, breaking forth in tlie assurance of 
final victory/^ Where, save in Christianity, is 
there a prospect of a grand and inspiring future 
for man on earth ? Where else is an antidote to 
the pessimism which creeps into the modern mind 
when it turns aw^ay from Christian revelation? 
What is there to kindle enthusiasm in Stoic or 
Agnostic anticipations of an approaching resolution 
of all things into chaos, to be followed by new 
cycles of development in endless and aimless suc- 
cession ? Say not that the kingdom of God is to 
be explained by a '' Semitic genius for monothe- 
ism/^ It is an historical blunder. What was the 
monotheism of Assyrian and Babylonian and 
Phoenician, of the devotee of Baal, of Astarte, of 
Moloch ? And Mohammedanism was the old 
Abraham ic theism, partly inherited and partly 
caught up from Judaism and a degenerate Chris- 
tianity. Hebrew monotheism was no result of 
mere natural instinct : it won for itself a footing 
and a permanent life only through arduous conflict 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 85 

witli tendencies to polytheism and idolatry. The 
native Semitic tendency may be seen in the un- 
speakable abominations of the Chaldean ritual, 
which were escaped by Abraham when he left his 
father, who even then had begun " to worship 
other gods.'^ The proposed offering-up of Isaac 
was not unlikely the turning-point where he cast 
behind him the idea of immolating human victims 
on the altar, one of the horrible features of worship 
in Babylon and Tyre. 

There ought to be no need of contending for the 
reasonableness of the Christian doctrine of the 
influence of the Spirit of God upon the influence 

of the 

human soul. With the idea of a divine spirit. 
influence upon the minds of men heathen antiquity 
found no difficulty. The analogies of a quickening, 
elevating, renovating power, superadded to definite 
instruction, and going forth from person to person, 
are familiar. Inquiries into the relation of the 
Spirit's influence to the free agency of the human 
will are only one branch of a problem which 
belongs as much to philosophy as to theology. 
They present no greater embarrassment in the 



86 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

matter of religion than in connection with any 
other department of human agency. Arguments 
for fatalism, such as they are, sweep over the entire 
field of voluntary activity. The consistency of 
free will and responsibility with the efficacy of 
inducements is as capable of vindication when re- 
pentance and conversion are the results produced 
as when it is the building of a house or the marry- 
ing of a wife. 

The Christian conception of God includes that 
which is positive in deism and pantheism, excluding 
imma- that which is negative and one-sided. 

nence and , •!•«-» • • r> 

Transcen- fepinoza, m his aihrmations, is not so tar 

dence of -^ '^ 

God. wrong, nor is Emerson, in his essay on 

^^The Over-soul.'' The difference between the 
deistic and pantheistic idea on the one hand, and 
the Christian idea on the other, is the difference be- 
tween a hemisphere and a globe. For Christianity, 
at the same time that it teaches the immanence 
of God in the world, and his all-pervading energy, 
likewise holds fast to his transcendence. It saves 
thus the personality of God and the free activity 
of man, both of wliich are essential to religion, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 87 

religion being the communion of person with per- 
son. Christianity, in distinction from the religions 
and philosophies of heathenism, affirms creation, 
and denies every species of dualism, thereby con- 
sistently maintaining that God is an absolute 
being, — a being not depending on any thing 
beyond himself for the realization of his essential 
attributes. 

It is impossible for the human mind to entertain 
a more exalted notion of the character of God than 
Christianity presents in the fore-front 

•^ -*- Character 

of its teaching. God is love. This is ^^ ^^^• 
not the assertion of the Apostle John alone. Who- 
ever thinks that Paul did not cherish a similar idea 
will disabuse his mind of this false impression by 
reading the thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle 
to the Corinthians. Such is the teaching of Christ. 
" The bruised reed he will not break,^^ etc. The 
mission of Christ is founded on the love and com- 
passion of God toward evil-doers, — ^toward those 
inimical to him. The Old-Testament Scriptures, 
in which law and justice are made prominent as a 
pre-requisite in the moral education of man for the 



\ 



88 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

gospel of forgiveness, dwell, also, on the love of 
God. He is " long-suflfering/^ " plenteous in mercy/^ 
feeling toward all who revere him a father's pity 
for his children, " forgiving iniquity, transgression, 
and sin/^ Nevertheless, throughout the Scriptures, 
it is a holy love which is predicated of God. Love 
is of necessity holy. Love infolds in itself hatred. 
It is impossible to love one thing without hating 
its moral opposite. He who loves the well-being 
of men must proportionally hate that which is 
fatal to man's well-being. He who is benevolent 
cannot avoid recoiling with abhorrence from ma- 
levolence and selfishness. That love of right is 
spurious the obverse side of which is not the detes- 
tation of wrong. The Great Teacher, therefore, in 
conformity with prophets and apostles, sets forth 
the righteous anger of God against sin, — a dis- 
pleasure which expresses itself in the divine 
administration of the world. This aspect of the 
character of God and of his government is not a 
proper object for concealment or apology. From 
beginning to end of the Bible, he is represented as 
tenderly meeting every penitent, as giving a welcome 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 89 

to the repenting soul like that of the father in the 
parable to the prodigal son who " had wasted his 
living among harlots.^^ " Though your sins are 
as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.^^ At the 
same time, toward the impenitent, who persist in 
trampling on sacred obligations, — obligations which 
bind together the moral system, as gravitation holds 
together the physical, — he presents himself in the 
character of a Judge who will '' by no means clear 
the guilty/^ It is " indignation and wrath, tribu- 
lation and anguish, upon every soul of man that 
doeth evil," but '^ glory, honor, and peace to every 
man that worketh good." Whoever cannot endure 
this character, whoever wants an indiscriminate 
lenity or indulgence, or no divine government at 
all, may as well turn away from Christianity at 
once. He will not be able to read a page in the 
New Testament or the Old with any satisfaction. 
But, when Christianity points out the unsparing 
righteousness of God in the infliction of penal evil, 
it goes no farther than the observation of the course 
of things among men warrants us in believing. 
We see enough to make the Christian doctrine 



90 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

credible. There are laws of character. Habits tend 
to irreversible permanence. There is a bondage 
under evil; and self-emancipation, or 
character. dcliverancc by any exterior influences, 
grows more and more difficult. Choice turns into 
a chain. Conscience cannot easily shake off" the 
presentiment of retribution to be met with in " the 
undiscovered country.^^ On this subject, Chris- 
tianity teaches, in the first place, that it is necessary 
for any true or blessed life that man should be 
reconciled and re-united to God. This is a funda- 
mental assertion ; Christianity stands or falls with 
it. In the second place, Christianity teaches that 
Jesus Christ is the only means to this end, or the 
only Saviour. It is through him, or on the founda- 
tion of what he does and suffers, that those who 
have no personal knowledge of him, in case they 
are ever brought into relations of conscious peace 
and fellow^ship with God, are delivered. The 
whole family of the redeemed are to stand in con- 
nection with him. Thirdly, Christianity teaches, 
as a corollary to the foregoing proposition, that the 
final rejection of the Saviour by those to whom he 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 91 

is made known^ leaves the soul without the hope 
of salvation. It is a self-evident truth, that, when 
there is only one means of salvation, perdition is 
the consequence of a persevering refusal to avail 
one's self of it. Such refusal is a voluntary act of 
self-destruction. Most Christians understand the 
New Testament to predict that there are those who 
will thus repel the approaches of mercy and help, 
and thus bring on themselves an endless doom, — 
endless from the fixity of habit, and their own 
irrevocable action, yet not the less penalty, since 
the law of habit is itself an apparatus not only of 
reward, but of retribution. There have been some 
eminent teachers of Christianity in ancient and in 
modern times who have dissented from the pre- 
vailing interpretation of the Scriptures. Some 
have thought that eventually the attractive power 
of God's love in the gospel will overcome all the 
opposition of the human will, pour light and 
warmth into the darkest mind, and bring to pass a 
universal restoration. Others, especially in later 
days, have beheved that intimations in the New 
Testament, coupled with observed tendencies of sin, 



92 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

justify the expectation that incorrigible souls will 
wear themselves out, consume their own powers of 
rational thought, and perish out of being. But all 
considerate Christians, be their opinions or doubts 
what they may, are bound to protest with all energy 
against any theory of fatalism which would attri- 
bute to sin a self-destroying character. The pan- 
theism which makes moral evil a phase of good, a 
transient phenomenon that eliminates itself, is in 
deadly hostility to the essential spirit of the Chris- 
tian religion. ^^ Woe unto them that call evil good, 
and good evil/^ Sin is self-propagating, not self- 
consuming. He who ventures to indulge the hope 
of a final recovery of all souls to holiness and to 
God has no moral right to the Christian name, if 
he founds his hope on any natural necessity, or on 
aught save the moral operation of motives which 
exert over the will no coercive agency. Perhaps 
the day will come when controversy on this subject 
will be less heated, and when a more chastened 
curiosity will exist respecting the statistics of the 
future world in its far remote aeons. 

As concerns the problem of the theodicy, the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGIOK 93 

difficulty presented to Christian theology is precisely 
the same as under every other religion or phil- 
osophy in which the reality of moral evil ^^^ ^^^ 
is not denied, and in which the Power ^^^'^^^ evU. 
that rules the world is neither conceived of as finite, 
or as deficient in benevolence. Physical and moral 
evil are here. We see and experience them both. 
They are permitted to be by the Author of the 
miiverse. The reasons why they are permitted, we 
are for the most part left to conjecture. Since the 
masterly discussion of Leibnitz, the objection to the 
perfection of God from the existence of' physical 
evil or suffering has been more seldom heard. On 
the supposition that moral evil is to exist, the 
existence of physical evil, where and when it is 
found, may be, for aught that anybody can prove 
to the contrary, beneficent. Moral evil or sin is 
purely the act of the creature. It is an abuse of 
freedom. It is overruled in the divine govern- 
ment, and turned into an occasion of multiform 
benefits which do not issue from its inherent tend- 
encies, and were not designed by the evil-doer. 
The question why it is allowed to be introduced by 



94 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

the all-foreseeing Deity is among the mysteries of 
life. But the objection of Epicurus and Hume can- 
not logically be urged against the divine omnipo- 
tence. It can never be proved that the exclusion 
of sin in any of the cases where it is suffered to 
occur, by dint of divine power interfering to pre- 
vent it, does not involve an incompatibility in the 
nature of things. It can never be proved that in 
a universe composed of rational agents further 
divine interposition for the exclusion of sin might 
not necessarily involve a degradation of the system, 
a diminution of the good to result from it, greater 
than any advantages consequent on such inter- 
ference. In other words, the permission, not the 
causation, of sin on the part of God may be the 
dictate of supreme wisdom. It is not a Christian 
philosophy which teaches that two and two may 
be five on some other planet, or that omnipotence 
can make a thing to be and not to be simultaneously, 
or achieve any other impossibilities. As long as 
this solution of the mystery of evil is a possible 
one, the impeachment of the divine power or good- 
ness has no logical foundation to rest upon. It is 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 95 

a subject on which all but the most presumptuous 
will be willing to wait for light. Meantime, Chris- 
tianity stands immeasurably above the ripest heathen 
philosophy in ascribing sin to the self-determina- 
tion of the creaturely will, instead of making it the 
necessary product of matter, or of any germ inhe- 
rent in the constitution of things. 

Protestant Christians hold the Bible to be the 
sufficient and authoritative rule of faith and conduct. 
The Scriptures are the umpire in contro- 

■•- -*■ Character 

versies. But it is to the Scriptures ^ft^^^Bibie 
collectively taken that these attributes pertain. We 
cannot open the Book of Leviticus, or any other 
book of the Old Testament, and apply forthwith a 
precept which falls under the eye to ourselves. We 
cannot select a verse in a Psalm, and adopt it, 
without consideration, as a sentiment suitable for 
a Christian to cherish. The Old Testament Scrip- 
tures are not Christian Scriptures. They belong to 
the earlier stages of revelation. The criterion to 
which every utterance, even of the most evangelical 
prophets, is to be brought is the teaching of Christ 
and his apostles. This truth derogates nothing 



96 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

from the proper dignity of the Old-Testament 
Scriptures, nor does it clash with any reasonable 
idea of inspiration. It is simply an inference from 
the progressive character of revelation, on which I 
have before commented. An illustration resembling 
one which Whately has somewhere presented may 
be of service. A father corresponds with an absent 
son from his childhood. The earliest of these letters 
will naturally contain injunctions and counsels 
adapted to the situation, needs, and temptations 
peculiar to a boy. He is exhorted, perhaps, to set 
apart a definite hour for play, and a particular time 
for writing his letters. He is enjoined to retire to 
bed at nine o'clock in the evening. Particular 
regulations are laid down relative to his clothing 
and his expenses. The letters for a number of 
years are composed largely of rules of behavior, 
aflFectionately, yet imperatively, urged, and inter- 
spersed with that sort of instruction in morals and 
religion which would be most easily apprehended 
by an immature mind. At length the son arrives 
at the stage of manhood, and shows the moulding 
agency of tliis long-continued guidance. Then the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 97 

father addresses him as a full-grown man, and 
communicates to him in one final composition the 
principles pertaining to life, duty, and man's des- 
tiny, which he deems of the highest moment. The 
son collects all these letters in a volume. They 
all discover in different degrees his father's charac- 
ter, and throw light on the path of his duty. But 
he would be a simpleton if he referred to the earliest 
and latest without discrimination, and confounded 
the injunctions given to a school-boy with the truths 
and appeals of that final letter. Rather would he 
test every thing previous by the contents of this 
last communication. The illustration wall mislead 
if it is understood to imply that the books of the 
Bible are to be literally described as letters from 
God to man. The point is simply that the progres- 
sive nature of revelation renders it necessary, as it 
is natural, to use the New Testament as the touch- 
stone of the relative completeness and the continued 
validity of all prior biblical teaching. It requires 
to be further said, that, from this gradually develop- 
ing nature of revelation, devotional expressions, 
current proverbs, and the varied expressions of a 



98 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

religious and ethical character, whether verbal or in 
the conduct of good men, will bear upon them 
traces of the limit of the knowledge possessed at 
different epochs. There is an Old-Testament type 
of piety w^hich is felt in all this literature. ^^The 
law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came 
by Jesus Christ/^ 

The critical study of the Bible, coupled with the 
general advance of physical and historical investiga- 
tion, have brought out in recent times, in more 
distinct relief, what is called the ^^ human side,^^ or 
Criticism factor, in the biblical writings. Scholarly 

and the 

Scriptures. criticism tends to the conclusion that there 
was a groT^i:h in Hebrew institutions and laws; 
that the codes were kept open, the original rubrics 
being retained ; that legislation was added, from 
time to time, under the guidance of prophets, to 
suit changing circumstances, new ordinances being 
looked on as Mosaic for the reason that they were 
conceived in the spirit and were considered a legiti- 
mate development of the primitive enactments. 
These questions are to be determined before the 
tribunal of searching and impartial scholarship. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 99 

But they involve no such peril to the Christian 
faith as they are often thought to contain. The 
religion of the chosen people is all within the covers 
of the Old Testament. The debate is about the 
order of stratification. The organic relation of the 
Old Testament religion to Christianity is a historical 
fact which stands on indisputable proof, and is 
altogether independent of these critical inquiries, 
however important in their place they may be. 
Of the Scriptures as a whole, it is true that the 
more they are studied in the light of modern science 
and learning, the more striking is felt to be the 
apostle's declaration, ^^We have this treasure in 
earthen vessels, that the power may be of God and 
not of men.'^ The power remains. The treasure 
is more evident from the homely casket which sur- 
rounds it. Traditional formulas relative to inspira- 
tion may undergo modification: they are not an 
integral element of the Christian religion, but 
belong to the attempts of scientific thought to define 
it. The great Protestant principle of the normal 
authority of the Bible as a teacher of religion and 
morals remains intact. What Christianity is can 



100 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 

be correctly ascertained from the Scriptures, and 
nowhere else. The marks of inspiration are stamped 
even on parts of Scripture which precede contem- 
porary authorship and testimony, — ^the one main 
criterion of historical proof. The attempted " recon- 
ciliations^^ of Genesis and science may not be happy, 
either as expositions of science or interpretations of 
literature ; but the sublime cosmogony which stands 
at the threshold of the Bible, the moment it is 
contrasted with the ancient Semitic traditions or 
legends, Assyrian, Babylonian, or Phoenician, with 
which it has features in common, is perceived to be 
immeasurably elevated above them. How came 
polytheism and dualism to be excluded here, and not 
elsew^here ? How did the pure theism, with its doc- 
trine of a Creator of man in his own image, of sin 
as man's free act, of guilt bringing shame, of im- 
morality and crime as flowing from practical athe- 
ism, — how did this mass of religious and moral 
truth, truth recognized throughout the Bible, and at 
the foundation of the Christian system, get into this 
Hebrew record ? Who can fail to see that a Spirit 
was at work in the Hebrew mind not manifested 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 101 

elsewhere ? As the magnet attracts only true metal, 
so did that mind, when moved by the Spirit of God, 
take up only those elements of belief which were 
consonant with the true religion. Books in the Old 
Testament which are a puzzle to some Christians, 
and are often a theme of derision, assume an utterly 
different character when they are considered from 
what I may call the historico-theological point of 
view. The Song of Solomon contains— except in 
one passage (chap. vii. 1-9), which is an interpola- 
tion — nothing to which a pure mind can take excep- 
tion. Instead of being marked by a sensual quality, 
as has often been asserted, it celebrates the virtue 
and victory of chaste love and constancy against all 
enticements. There is not a syllable in the Bible, 
from Genesis to the Apocalypse, which is adapted 
to foster impure passion. Those who are fond of 
contrasting the Old Testament with the New, as 
if there were a contrariety between them, must find 
it hard to explain how the Old Testament could 
have been so cherished by Christ and the apostles. 
Why were they not shocked by what we are told is 
hostile to the spirit of Christianity ? It is plain 



102 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

that the drift of the Old Testament is all in the 
right direction. The Book of Jonah — whether it 
be held that it was meant to be history, or was 
meant as a parable, like the tale of the Pharisee 
and the Publican, as many Christian scholars hold 
— contains a beautiful lesson of Jehovah's pity for 
the heathen, and affords a foreglimpse of the 
broader discovery of God^s love which is made in 
the gospel. It is a rebuke of Jewish narrowness 
and harshness : it really marks an advance in 
revelation. The proverbs are an anthology of wise 
sayings by Solomon and other sages, as the Psalms 
are an anthology of hymns by David and other 
poets. They are differentiated, as I have said 
before, from heathen literature: another spirit 
dwells in them. Only they must be tested by 
Christianity, which is the complement of all prior 
revelations. 

The gospel was brought into the world in a way 
to pour contempt on human pride. There is no 
The Gospel pomp of any sort attending its advent. 
of a Servant Humblc, Unlearned men are chosen for 
its first teachers. The Lord himself was in the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGIOK 103 

form of a servant. The New-Testament Scriptures 
are in keeping with the lowly circumstances that 
invested Christianity at its origin. They^ too, from 
the ordinary point of view of the world, "are with- 
out form or comeliness.'^ They are not elaborate 
compositions. No pains are taken to disarm preju- 
dice, anticipate cavils and objections, frame a case 
all parts of which are nicely fitted together to defy 
attack. Attacks are expected. They are predicted. 
The Divine Author of Christianity has rather 
chosen to leave much in the Christian documents 
that may easily provoke disesteem and even scepti- 
cism. A test is presented of the candor, the earn- 
estness, and, above all, of the real desire to find 
God, and to obtain forgiveness and peace from 
him. 

There is room for brief observations on the ethics 
of Christianity. It is never to be forgotten that 
Christianity is in its essence a religion. The Ethics 
Its end IS a transformation of character, p^i. 
It aims to make man "a new creature '^ by connect- 
ing him with Christ, the herald, the type, and the 
creative potence of a perfected humanity. It incul- 



104 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

cates priDciples rather than specific statutes for the 
regulation of conduct. It is sometimes said that 
the golden rule is not peculiar to the gospel. As 
found in Isocrates, Confucius, the Rabbis, and in 
other authors where it is alleged to occur, it appears 
either in a negative form, "Do not unto others,'^ 
etc. ; or in some restricted application, as to the 
relation of husbands, fathers, or children. In the 
gospel it stands in a form at once affirmative and 
universal. But, even if an equivalent injunction 
were to be met w^ith elsewhere, it would be more 
pertinent to show w^here, save in Christianity, there 
has been provided an efficient motive and inspira- 
tion to its fulfilment. Moreover, this precept is far 
from being an adequate guide of life, when severed 
from the Christian truth connected with it. The 
rule to treat others as we should wish to be treated 
ourselves, or even as we should think it right for 
others to treat us, requires as its complement a true 
idea of man as he ought to be. We must know in 
what man's well-being consists. What ought we 
to desire at the hands of others ? The golden rule 
is simply to brace men up on the weak side. It is 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 105 

to counteract the bias of self-love, the most prolific 
source of injustice and unkindness. This is the 
limit of its function. It is one of those parts of 
New Testament teaching which the natural con- 
science sanctions, if it fails to suggest. 

The New Testament insists on general affections. 
It lays stress on philanthropy, because at that age 
there was no need to exhort men to 

Patriotism. 

patriotism. The tendency was to make 
love of country the acme of virtuous attainment. 
But Christianity never disparages particular affec- 
tions, such as bind men together in families and 
communities. It simply guards against their ex- 
aggeration, and insists on a benevolence as broad 
as humanity. 

It is a narrow and frigid method of interpretation 
which finds in the sermon on the mount a universal 
prohibition of the use of force. The 

■*■ The use of 

precept of non-resistance is like that — ^^^^^" 
which is a branch of it — enjoining that if a man is 
sued for his coat he is to give, unasked, his cloak 
also. In all such precepts the thing forbidden is 
malice and revenge. The thing commanded, as the 



106 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

main reliance for the overcoming of evil^ is the 
practice of forbearance and kindness. But the 
state, as an organization of force, existing by divine 
authority for the maintenance of justice, is sanctioned 
by Christ and the apostles. Nor does the spirit of 
Christianity forbid the use of force for ends con- 
sonant with those for which the civil authority is 
established. The limit to the duty of civil obedi- 
ence is where human law is in direct conflict with 
the divine. Then a Christian is to obey God rather 
than man. To conclude that there is an obligation 
of passive obedience in all conceivable cases, and no 
right of revolution, is an unwarrantable inference 
from injunctions given at a time when armed 
resistance to tyranny would have been a suicidal 
folly, and directed to those charged with a special 
mission to found, by persuasion and by patient suf- 
fering, the new kingdom of God among men. 

10. The relation of Christianity to ethnic religions 

and to philosophy among the heathen is not that of 

unqualified repugnance. The " w^ild- 

reiigions. growing religions,'' as Schelling calls 

them, may have in them important elements of 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 107 

truth. These are found in their right place in the 
Christian system. In one religion^ the teaching 
of Buddha, there is an impressive inculcation of 
sympathy and philanthropy. It is linked with a 
gloomy metaphysic which places the highest hope 
of the soul in the annihilation of personal being. 
That system, in its proper consequences, is fatal to 
responsibility as well as to hope. All that is good 
in Buddhism is found in the gospel, without its 
dismal accompaniment of atheism and the drown- 
ing of personality in a fathomless ocean of being. 
How infinitely richer is the good offered to the 
wretched victims of caste in the invitation of Jesus, 
" Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy- 
laden, and I will give you rest,^^ — words which 
Augustine says he had never found in Plato, high as 
he rated the charms of that prince of philosophers. 
AVhatever in Greek philosophy or the uninspired 
sages of other peoples is true to human nature, 
Christianity welcomes as congenial Avith itself, and 
knows how to assimilate. Orthodox fathers of the 
ancient Church did not hesitate to say that rays of 
light from above had fallen into the minds of 



108 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 

Socrates and other masters of wisdom, who rose 
into a higher atmosphere than was breathed by the 
generations among whom their lot was cast, — men 
of whom it might be said that heathen society 
'' was not worthy.'^ Stoicism yearned for a universal 
polity. As the ancient states, one after another, 
fell to pieces, there were those who aspired after a 
broader and permanent bond of union. Cicero, in 
a strain caught from those teachers, discourses of a 
universal "commonwealth" of gods and men. 
These were aspiration^ which could never be real- 
ized on the soil of heathen antiquity. They were 
dreams awaiting a fulfilment. They were uncon- 
scious prophecies of the brotherhood of mankind, 
secured in the fellowship of Jesus Christ, and of the 
Church opening its doors to every nation and every 
rank. 

It is, likewise, a part of the genius of Christianity 
to foster, within its due limit, every genuine expres- 
sion of human nature, to encouras^e the 

Christianity ^ ^ 

and Society, development of the human mind, and the 
promotion of human welfare in all directions. 
Christianity seeks to mould society according to 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 109 

justice and love. It seeks to infuse into govern- 
ment and legislation the spirit of equity. It favors 
education and culture, because it values the human 
soul infinitely above every exterior good. It is 
friendly to art, for the love of beauty is allied to 
the love of goodness. Whatever inventions and 
discoveries lighten the burden of labor, minister to 
the healing of the sick, and heighten the comforts 
of daily existence, are welcomed by the followers of 
him who went about doing good. Christianity is 
not an ascetic system. The . kingdom of God on 
earth is not a ghostly community, busied exclusively 
with religious exercises. It is humanity developed, 
trained, perfected on every side. Christian virtue 
is no ^^fugitive and cloistered virtue.'^ " Whatsoever 
things are true, whatsoever things are honest, what- 
soever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, 
whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are 
of good report,'' Christians are exhorted to pay 
regard to. The comprehensive command of Christ 
is, '' Be ye perfect.'' Perfection is reached in the 
disciple as in Christ, not by "minding his own 
things," but "the things of others." To live and 



110 THE CHRISTIAN EELIGIOK 

labor for the world without worldliness — that is, 
subordinating all material good to that which is 
spiritual and walking by faith in things not seen — 
is a Christian's work. 

Let a thoughtful man contemplate the prospects 

of mankind on the supposition that the Christian 

, ^ faith is to pass away. Civilization ad- 

Need of r y 

of1;he^^^ vances. Human science goes forward 
as far as it can in alleviating bodily 
pain. Provisions for living comfortably are mul- 
tiplied in a degree at present incalculable, and are 
diffused abroad. Knowledge increases more and 
more. Wars come to an end. Governments become 
equitable and beneficent. Manners take on a finer 
quality. Conceive that such a progress of mankind 
is possible, apart from the purifying and restrain- 
ing influence of religion, — an expectation for which 
neither human nature nor experience affords the 
slightest warrant, — what then? Are men who are 
thus advanced in the intellectual scale and in the 
affections of the heart to be satisfied with a merely 
mundane existence ? Can they content themselves 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 111 

to live in this way with no wider horizon, and then 
to pass out of being ? Will they find a sufficient 
stimulus to labor for their race in the mere hope 
of rendering the earth a more comfortable abode 
for tenants who in swift succession rise into being 
and sink into the grave, as flowers blossom and the 
next day fall from their stems ? The further civil- 
ization advances, were a sure advance practicable 
without the inspiration and the safeguards of reli- 
gion, the more intolerable human life would become. 
Man would be less happy than the animals. The 
brutes have no thoughts or imaginations above the 
necessities of the hour ; but man, with a nature 
too large to be satisfied with earthly good, is cut 
off from any thing higher. The dignity of life, 
and its joy not less, are gone when there are no 
ties connecting this brief existence with a world 
unseen. 

I have spoken of Christianity, making no effort 
to confute atheism. It is no part of my plan to 
set forth the evidences of the being; of , , . 

^ The being 

God. He reveals himself in the consti- "^^ ^'^'^• 
tution of the human soul, a free intelligence, which 



112 THE CHBISTIAN RELIGION. 

cannot explain itself to itself by any material 
causes among which freedom has no place and 
intelligence does not exist. He reveals himself in 
conscience^ through which an imperative law is 
imposed on us, which is superior to the human will 
and independent of it. He reveals himself in the 
order and design which render science possible, and 
which bring home to the unperverted mind the 
conviction that the world is framed and sustained 
by an intelligent Creator. He reveals himself in 
the course of history, in the working out of ends 
by the concurrence of numberless instruments, 
neither of whom comprehends the plan w^hich he 
takes part in executing, and in the traces of a 
righteous government which, amid all the confusion 
of human affairs, are clearly discerned, and which 
excite a rational presentiment of a more complete 
manifestation of justice hereafter. Nothing can be 
more irrational than criticism of the justice and 
goodness of the First Cause of all things ; for that 
there is a First Cause few reasoners are so unphilo- 
sophical as to call in question. The Author of the 
universe is the author of the human faculties by 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 113 

which we judge of truth and falsehood^ of good 
and evil. If he is not righteous, what reason have 
we to trust the faculties which he has given us ? 
What ground have we to rely on any conclusion ? 
and, if not on any conclusion, how can we put 
confidence in impressions that we may have in 
regard to the Creator's attributes ? Faith in God 
is the presupposition of faith in our own intel- 
lectual processes. 

In the foregoing discussion I have endeavored to 
state the opinions of Christians correctly, wherever 
I have professed to refer to general or christian- 
prevailing beliefs. In other cases I sects. 
have expressed frankly my personal convictions. 
Christianity is the peculiar property of no indi- 
vidual and of no single sect. Whoever defends it 
or assails it has no right to confound peculiarities 
of doctrine found here or there among Christians, 
or even widely prevalent, with the catholic faith, 
or that great substance of belief which Christians 
generally unite in cherishing. I have passed in 
rapid review a series of topics, to either of which 
a volume might well be devoted. If the effect is 



114 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 

to give to any disbeliever or doubter a more 
enlightened conception of the religion of Christ, 
and to diminish prejudices which often spring from 
incorrect teaching, I shall feel that I have not 
written in vain. Should any one be moved to 
controvert statements in the preceding pages, I 
shall not, partly for the reasons stated at the outset, 
feel obliged to make reply. I have no fear that 
candid readers will infer from my silence that the 
propositions which have been stated above admit 
of no further defence. 



THE END. 



EPOCHS OF HISTORY. 



*'A Series of concise and carefully prepared volumes on special 
eras of history. Each is devoted to a group of events of such 
importance as to entitle it to be regarded as an epoch. Each 
is also complete in itself, and has no especial connection with 
the other members of the series. The works are all written 
by authors selected by the editor on account of some especial 
qualifications for a portrayal of the period they respectively 
describe. The volumes form an excellent collection, especially 
adapted to the wants of ageneral reader." — CHARLES KENDALL 
ADAMS, President of Cornell University. 

**'The * Epochs of History ' seem to me to have been prepared with 
knowledge and artistic skill to meet the wants of a large number 
of readers. To the young they furnish an outline or compen- 
dium which may serve as an introduction to more extended 
study. To those who are older they present a convenient sketch 
of the heads of the knowledge which they have already acquired. 
The outlines are by no means destitute of spirit, and may be 
used with great profit for family reading, and in select classes 
or reading zluhs,'''— NOAH PORTER, President of Yale College. 

** It appears to me that the idea of Morris in his Epochs is strictly 
in harmony with the philosophy of history— namely, that 
great movements should be treated not according to narrow 
geographical and national limits and distinction, but uni- 
versally, according to their place in the general life of the 
world. The historical Maps and the copious Indices are 
welcome additions to the volumes."— ^zj/z^/ JOHN F. HURST, 
Ex-President of Drew Theolcgical Seminary. 

"The volumes contain the ripe results of the studies of men who 
are authorities in their respective fields."— 77z^ Nation. 

*'To be appreciated they must be read in their entirety; and we 
do no more than simple justice in commending them earnestly 
to the favor of the studious public." — The New York World. 

The great success of the series is the best proof of its general 
popularity, and the excellence of the various volumes is further 
attested by their having been adopted as text-books in many of 
our leading educational institutions, including Harvard, Cornell, 
Wesleyan, Vermont, and Syracuse Universities ; Yale, Princeton, 
Amherst, Dartmouth, Williams, Union, and Smith Colleges ; and 
many other colleges, academies, normal and high schools. 



EPOCHS OF MODERN HISTORY. 

A SERIES OF BOOKS NARRATING THE HISTORY OF 

ENGLAND AND EUROPE AT SUCCESSIVE EPOCHS 

SUBSEQUENT TO THE CHRISTIAN ERA. 

Edited by 

Edward E. Morris. 

Sixteen volumes, i6mo, with 70 Maps, Plans and Tables. 

Sold separately. Price per vol., $1.00. 

The Set, Roxburgh style, gilt top, in box, $16.00. 

THE BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES— England and Europe 

in the Ninth Century. By the Very Rev. R. W. Church, M. A. 
THE NORMANS IN EUROPE— The Feudal System and England 

under Norman Kings. By the Rev. A. H. Johnson, M.A. 
THE CRUSADES. By the Rev. G. W. Cox, M.A. 
THE EARLY PLANTAGE NETS— Their Relation to the History 

of Europe : The Foundation and Growth of Constitutional 

Government. By the Rev. Wm. Stubbs, M.A. 
EDWARD III. By the Rev. W. Warburton, M.A. 
THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK— The Conquest and 

Loss of France. By James Gairdner. 
THE ERA OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION. By Frederic 

Seebohm. With Notes on Books in English relating to the 

Reformation. By Prof. George P. Fisher, D.D. 
THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. By the Rev. M. Creighton, M.A. 
THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR, 1618-1648. By Samuel Rawson 

Gardiner. 
THE PURITAN REVOLUTION; and the First Two Stuarts, 

1603-1660. By Samuel Rawson Gardiner. 
THE FALL OF THE STUARTS; and Western Europe. By the 

Rev. Edv^ard Hale, M.A. 
THE AGE OF ANNE. By Edward E. Morris, M.A. 
THE EARLY HANOVERIANS— Europe from the Peace of Utrech to 

the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. By Edward E. Morris, M.A. 
FREDERICK THE GREAT AND THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR. By 

F. W. Longman. 
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND FIRST EMPIRE. By 

William O'Connor Morris. With Appendix by Andrew 

D. White, LL.D., Ex-Pres't of Cornell University. 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM, 1830-1850. By Justin McCarthy. 

These volumes^ read consecutively, form the best history of 
Modern Times. 



EPOCHS OF ANCIENT HISTORY. 

A SERIES OF BOOKS NARRATING THE HISTORY OF 

GREECE AND ROME, AND OF THEIR RELATIONS TO 

OTHER COUNTRIES AT SUCCESSIVE EPOCHS. 

Edited by 

Rev. G. W. Cox and Charles Sankey, M.A. 

Eleven volumes, i6mo, with 41 Maps and Plans. 

Sold separately. Price per vol., $1.00. 

The Set, Roxburgh style, gilt top, in box, $11.00. 

TROY— ITS LEGEND. HISTORY, AND LITERATURE. By 
S. G. W. Benjamin. 

THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS. By the Rev. G. W. Cox. 

THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE— From the Flight of Xerxes to the 
Fall of Athens. By the Rev. G. W. Cox. 

THE SPARTAN AND THEBAN SUPREMACIES. By Charles 
Sankey, M.A. 

THE MACEDONIAN EMPIRE— Its Rise and Culmination to the 
Death of Alexander the Great. By A. M. Curteis, M.A. 

The five volumes above give a connected and complete history 
of Greece from the earliest times to the death of Alexander. 

EARLY ROME— From the Foundation of the City to its Destruc- 
tion by the Gauls. By W. Ihne, Ph.D. 

ROME AND CARTHAGE— The Punic Wars. By R. Bosworth 
Smith, M.A. 

THE GRACCHI, MARIUS, AND SULLA. By A. H. Beesly, M.A. 

THE ROMAN TRIUMVIRATES. By the Very Rev. Charles 
Merivale, D.D. 

THE EARLY EMPIRE— From the Assassination of Julius Caesar 
to the Assassination of Domitian. By the Rev. W. Wolfe 
Capes, M.A. 

THE AGE OF THE ANTONINES— the Roman Empire of the 
Second Century. By the Rev. W. Wolfe Capes, M.A. 

The six vohimes above give the History of Rome from the 
founding of the City to the death of Marcus Amelins Antoninus. 



PROF. G. P. FISHER'S WORKS. 



THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN 
BELIEF. I vol., crown 8vo, $2.50. 

The need of a new book on Evidences to replace the older treatises, which 
do not meet the wants of the present time, is universally admitted. Prof. 
Fisher possesses eminent qualifications for supplying this need in his thorough 
knowledge of all the later thinking on the subject and an extensive acquaint- 
ance with the arguments on both sides of the question, combined with a power 
of condensation and a clear, attractive style. 

From a Letter of Julius H. Seelye, President of Amherst College, 
'' I find it as I should expect it to be, wise and candid, and convincing to 
an honest mmd. I congratulate you upon its publication, in which you seem 
to me to have rendered a high public service." 

From Prof. James O. Murray, of Princeton College, in the N. Y. Evangelist. 
•'The volume under review meets here a great want, and meets it well. 
It is emmently fitted to meet the honest doubts of some of our best young men. 
, . . . Its fairness and candor, its learning and ability in argument, its 
thorough handling of »?(9^^r?2 objections — all these qualities fit it for such a 
service, and a great service it is.'* 

Frofn the Congregationalist. 
" We hope that this treatise will be widely scattered and diligently studied. 
It is wholly in the right direction. It is liberal without being loose, learned 
without being dry, conclusive without being assuming, and indicates its 
author's place among the ablest writers of the day on Christian themes." 

ESSAYS ON THE SUPERNATURAL ORIGIN OF 
CHRISTIANITY. ivol.,8vo, new and enlarged edition, 
$3.00. 

From the North American Review. 
*'Able and scholarly essays on the Supernatural Origin of Christianity, 
in which Prof. Fisher discusses such subjects as the genuineness of the Gospel 
of John, Baur's view of early Christian History and Literature, and the mythi- 
cal theory of Strauss." 

From the Methodist Quarterly Review. 
" The entire work is one of the noblest, most readable, most timely and 
effective in our apologetic literature, which has appeared at the present day," 

From, the New York Tribune. 
"The author seems equally at home in every department of his subject. 
They are all treated with learning, with insight, with sense, and discrimina- 
tion. His volume evinces rare versatility of intellect, with a scholarship no 
less sound and judicious in its tone and extensive in its attainments than it is 
modest in its pretensions." 

From the British Quarterly Review. 
** We know not where the student will find a more satisfactory guide in 
relation to the great questions which have grown up between the friends of 
the Christian revelation and the most able of its assailants, within the memory 
of the present generation. . . . To all these topics the author has brought 
a fullness of learning, a masculine discernment, and a sturdy impartiality 
which we greatly admire." 



HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION. ''APopuhr 
Manual for Instruction and Study." i vol., crown 8vo, new 
and cheaper edition, $2.50. 

From the Christian Union. 

*'The book is a remarkable instance of that power of lucid condensation 
which its author possesses in a high degree. . . . The quality of condensed- 
ness renders it worthy to be studied, not merely read ; and it would be excel- 
lent as a text book in college. The references are full and valuable, and the 
chronological table and list of authorities will be appreciated by all students." 

From Prof. Charles A. Aiken, D.D., Princeton Theological Seminary. 

"Professor Fisher's History of the Reformation presents the results of 
prolonged, extended, and exact study, with those excellent qualities of style 
which are so characteristic of him — clearness, smoothness, judicial fairness, 
vividness, felicity in arranging material, as well as in grouping and delineating 
characters. It must become not only a library favorite, but a popular 
manual, where such a work is required for instruction and study. For such 
uses it seems to mc admirably adapted." 

THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. With a 
view of the state of the Roman World at the Birth of Christ. 
I vol., 8vo, $3.00. 

From the Boston Advertiser. 
*' Prof. Fisher has displayed in this, as in his previous published writings, 
that catholicity and that calm judicial quality of mind which are so indispens- 
able to a true historical critic." 

From the Examiner. 
"The volume is not a dry repetition of well-known facts. It bears the 
marks of original research. Every page glows with freshness of material and 
choiceness of diction." 

From the Evangelist . 
** The volume contains an amount of information that makes it one of the 
most useful of treatises for a student in philosophy and theology, and must 
secure for it a place in his library as a standard authority." 

DISCUSSIONS IN HISTORY AND THEOLOGY. 

I vol., 8vo, $3.00. 

•* Prof. Fisher has gathered here a number of essays on subjects connected 
with these departments of study and research which have engaged his special 
attention, and in which he has made himself an authority. 

FAITH AND RATIONALISM. i vol., i2mo, new and 
cheaper edition, 75 cents. 

From the New York Times. 
"This little volume may be regarded as virtually a primer of modern 
religious thought, which contains within its condensed pages rich materials 
that are not easily gathered from the great volumes of our theological authors." 
From the Presbyterian. 
"The author deals with many of the questions of the day, and does so with 
a freshness and completeness quite admirable and attractiire." 

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. i vol., i6mo, cloth, 
50 cents net. 
"This masterly essay of Prof. Fisher is one of the bast arguments for 
Christianity that could be placed in the hands of those who have come under 
the influence of sceptical writers." 



BOOKS AND READING. A new edition. By Noah 

Porter, LL.D., President of Yale College. With an appendix 

giving valuable directions for courses of reading, prepared by 

James M. Hubbard, late of the Boston Public Library, i vol., 

crown 8vo, §2.00. 

It would be difficult to name any American better qualified than President 
Porter to give advice upon the important question of " What to Read and Kow 
to Read." His acquaintance with the whole range of English literature is most 
thorough and exact, and his judgments are eminently candid and mature. A 
safer guide — in short, in all literary matters — it would be impossible to find. 

" The great value of the book lies not in prescribing courses of reading, 
but in a discussion of principles, which lie at the foundation of all valuable 
systematic reading." — The Christian Standard. 

*' Young people who wish to know what to read and how to read it, or how 
to pursue a particular course of reading, cannot do better than begin with this 
book, which is a practical guide to the whole domain of literature, and is full of 
wise suggestions for the improvement of the mind." — Philadelphia Bulletin. 

" President Porter himself treats of all the leading departments of litera- 
ture of course with abnndant knowledge, and with what is of equal importance 
to him, with a very definite and serious purpose to be of service to inexperi- 
enced readers. There is no better or more interesting book of its kind now 
wi thin their reach." — Boston Advertiser. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 

ELEMENTS OF INTELLECTUAL PHILOSOPHY. 

A Manual for Schools and Colleges. Abridged from " The 
Human Intellect." i vol., 8vo, $3.00. 

This work is used as a text book in Yale, Dartmouth, Bowdoln, Oberlin, 
Bates, Hamilton, Vassar, and Smith Colleges ; Wesleyan, Ohio, Lehigh, and 
Wooster Universities, and many other colleges, academies, normal and high 
schools. 



ELEMENTS OF MORAL SCIENCE, Theoretical and 
Practical, i vol., 8vo, §3. 00. 

From George S. Morris, Professor of Ethics, University of Michigan. 

" I have read the work with great interest, and parts of it with enthusiasm. 
It is a vast improvement on any of the current text books of ethics. It is tole- 
rant and catholic in tone ; not superficially, but soundly, inductive in method 
and tendency, and rich in that kind of practical suggestion by which, even 
more than by the formal statement of rules, the formation of character is 
capable of being determined." 

From E. G. Robinson, Presidejtt of Brown University . 
**It has all the distinguishing marks of the author's work on 'The Human 
Intellect,' is full and comprehensive in its treatment, dealing largely with 
current discussions, and very naturally follows it as a text book for the 
class room." 



AN OUTLINE STUDY OF MAN; or, the Body 
and Mind in One System. With illustrative diagrams. 
By Mark Hopkins, D.D., LL.D., late President of Williams 
College. I vol., i2mo, $1.75. 

Few colleges owe so much to the influence of a single man as 
the institution, with which Dr. Hopkins has so long been identi- 
fied, owes to his genius for instruction and to the weight of his 
character. His power of making abstuse and difficult matters 
clear and easily mastered, of interesting and stimulating his pupils 
and of impressing them with his own lofty views, have given 
him an almost unique position as an educator. 

Among all his works, that which illustrates best his peculiar 
lucid mode of teaching difficult subjects is An Otif/me Study of 
Man, which is a model of the developing method as applied to 
intellectual science The work is on an entirely new plan. It 
presents man in his unity, and his several faculties and their rela- 
tions are so presented to the eye in illustrative diagrams as to be 
readily apprehended. 

Dr. Hopkins' work has come into more general use in this 
country than any other book designed for instruction in mental 
science. It has been found to be better adapted for educational 
uses than any other, and the demand for it is increasing every year. 



THE LAW OF LOVE, AND LOVE AS A LAW; 
or, Christian Ethics, i vol., i2mo, $1.75. 

This work is designed to follow the author's Outline Study of 
Man. As its title indicates it is entirely an exposition of the 
cardinal precept of Christian philosophy in harmony with nature 
and on the basis of reason. 

Like the treatise on mental philosophy it is adapted with un- 
usual skill to educational uses. 

It appears in a new edition, which has been in part rewritten 
in order to bring it into closer relation to his Outline Study of 
Man, of which work it is really a continuation. More prominence 
has been given to the idea of Rights, but the fundamental doctrines 
of the treatise have not been changed. The very interesting cor- 
respondence with Dr. McCosh is retained. 

From an able review of the work on its first appearance we 
quote the following : 

"In this work Dr. Hopkins has given the world a clear exposition of the 
principles of moral science, and practical rules for their application. The sim- 
plicity, strength, and exactness of its style and language; its discriminating 
analysis and forcible logic; its accurate adjustments of relative truths; its 
admirable blending of the independence of human reason with dependence 
upon the Divine mind ; — in all these respects we have no hesitation in saying that 
its combined excellences place the work at the head of all similar treatises." 



A Vade Meeum for Young Men and Students. 



ON SELF-CULTURE ; 

INTELLECTUAL, PHYSICAL, AND MORAL, 
By JOHN STUART BLACKIE, 

PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVEI SI FY OF EDIxNBURGH, AND AUTHOR OF 
" FOUR PHASES OF MORALS," ETC. 

One Volume, 16mo, cloth, $1.00. 



From the Ne%u York Evening Post. 

"The reader himself must go to this little volume. It is full of excellent 
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said enough, * 

Fro?n the Boston Transcript. 

'' Prof Blackie's little book is so full of strong Scotch common-sense and 
of judicious counsel in regard to the aims, studies, and habits of young men, 
that it ought to find its way to the library, and to the head and heart of every 
young man — and young woman, too — in all English-speaking countries," 

From the Church^nan. 
" The volume is one which every young man ought to read. It sets forth, 
in a way which no recent writer has equaled, the relations between intel- 
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vade mecujn,^^ 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 

WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

One Volume, 16mo, cloth, 75 cents. 

From the Hartford Courant. 
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written by John Stuart Blackie, of Edinburgh, is likely to be. . . . We can 
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From the Illustrated Christian WeeJcly. 
*' It will repay repeated perusal and is a book to own." 

From, the Far^n, Field and Stockman, Chicago. 
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any social reading club, than this little book." 



These hooks are for sale by all booksellers., or will be sent, prepaid ^ on 
receipt of price by the publishers. 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 
T4i:3 AND ^-45 BR.OAID\?VAY, - NKW YORK. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

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